Review Detail

I've long had a love-hate relationship with Taxi Driver, but this edit addresses nearly all of those problems. The ham-fisted narration is gone, the schizophrenic and silly romantic subplot (the less horny Travis seems, the more we can all appreciate him as any kind of heroic, even anti-heroic, father figure to Iris without it seeming creepy), and overall the film has a focus and silent eerieness that it was missing with the v/o. I don't want to spend time in Travis' head, privy to his thoughts, but I absolutely want to watch him struggle through his alienated, tortured existence.

Maniac's done a great job of whittling down Taxi Driver to a violent, gut punch of a short film, and while some may argue that Travis' motives for assassinating Palantine make less sense without his rejection by Betsy the campaign worker, how many times have we now seen mass shootings/killings that had no discernable point? Travis' motiveless attempt on Palantine seems as arbitrary as his own nocturnal travails which lends a different kind of bleak poetry to the movie.

My only real disappointment came at the end with the excising of the best shot in the whole movie, Travis' funny, sad, terrifying finger-gun to the temple when the police arrive. I'm not sure what was accomplished by losing that, but everything up to that point made me appreciate the movie in new ways, and may well be the only version I watch for a long time.