Hey, when you’ve got one of the greatest, most gripping,
gritty movies of all time, what do you need? Why, a lame sequel to ruin it:
that’s what! (See: Halloween II, 1981,
where they ruined the whole thing by making Jamie Lee Curtis’s character the
killer’s long-lost sister. Lame. And it’s now remembered as gospel by everyone,
so it even ruins the first movie retroactively for most everybody. And what
really blown my mind is that Carpenter and Hill supposedly wrote it {!?!}. But maybe
that was their version of doing what I’m doing here: making an intentionally
bad sequel for fun. Who knows?) And seeing as how there has been some talk of a
real Taxi Driver sequel from
DeNiro and Scorsese (according to the Taxi Driver Wikipedia page, anyway), I thought I might suggest a
storyline. So here it is, my conception of Taxi Driver 2: Limo Driver:
We begin our story a few years after the events of the movie
Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle has
completely recovered from his injuries, and after getting out of the hospital,
he becomes a minor celebrity and as a result he is asked by the owner if a
limousine company to be a limo driver. So he drives limousines, which he soon
finds is just the same as it used to be for him when he drove a cab, only the
degenerates are richer and more well-dressed, and he starts to look at every
level of society as being just as corrupt and debased as the red light
district. And just when he thinks he can’t take it anymore, he’s sent to the
airport to pick someone up, and who do you suppose it is? Why, it’s that
presidential candidate (who lost the election, but is still a senator) who he
tried to assassinate: Senator Palantine, and he’s with Cybill Shepherd, and
he’s flirting with her (!!). So Travis kills the senator, stuffs his body in
the trunk, abducts Cybill Shepherd, and escapes in the limousine, driving to
Atlantic City to try to escape detection (with so many limos likely to be
there). It’s all working perfectly until a police dog notices the smell, and
then the blood, coming from the trunk, whereupon he is caught by police. And
when the papers get a hold of the story, they write: “Crazy ‘Hero’ Cabbie Who
Shot Pimp Kills Senator, Claims They’re All Alike.” And as Travis Bickle is
arraigned on murder charges, Cybill Shepherd promises her parents she’ll never
get involved with a politician, or a taxi driver, again. The End.
Actually, this might end up being an almost reasonable, if
banal and predictable, lame sequel to Taxi Driver. I could almost see this kind of story being made. Oh well: I tried to
make it silly and stupid enough to be funny, but like Travis Bickle, I guess I
was sidetracked by things beyond my control. (But you know, what might make a
decent story for a Taxi Driver
sequel would be to have a middle-aged Travis Bickle work as a livery cab or
limo driver, and he gets hired to be a driver for some Wall St. investment firm
that screws a bunch of people out of their retirement, and Travis sees this
affect and devastate people while the bankers live it up in the lap of luxury,
so he decides to make them pay for it, using his job with the firm as a way to
get into the building, etc. That might work pretty well, and remain in
character with the previous movie. Except that in this case, Travis would
become a folk hero, rather than the psychotic sociopath he really is. And that
might be a dangerous example to set.)
(BTW: One of the things for me that makes Taxi Driver so great is how Travis claims in writing before the
assassination attempt on Senator Palpatine, um, I mean, uh, Palantine, that
this is his destiny, and everything has been leading up to this. Then, when he
goes to do it, he’s chased off by the Secret Service guys, he runs away, and
then his life takes an entirely new sidetracked track (forgetting all about his so-called destiny), whereupon he’s declared
a “hero”. This really shows how lives can change in an instant by some
unexpected occurrence, and how we can sometimes be just moved around by things
completely beyond our control despite our most insistently stubborn efforts.
And villains can become heroes, and vice versa, sometimes just by accident.
That rings so true, especially in this world full of people saying: “You can be
anything you want to be.” With a lot of luck, hard work and talent, maybe you
can be anything you want to be; but it’s certainly not guaranteed, no matter
what people say.)
Also, I find it odd that John Hinkley said he shot President
Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, when Travis Bickle clearly intended to shoot
Senator Palantine to impress Cybill Shepherd. So shouldn’t he have said he was
trying to impress Cybill Shephard? If he wanted to impress Jodie Foster,
wouldn’t it have made more sense to try to shoot a pimp? I mean, if we’re
talking about Taxi Driver as being the
motivating factor here. But you know, he was found not guilty by reason of
insanity, so maybe he didn’t follow the plot so well. In fact, and I haven’t
thought of this before right now, maybe if he had shown correct logic according
to the movie’s plot, he would have been found guilty, and by mixing up the
characters and so forth, perhaps Hinckley was able to pull the wool over the
jury’s eyes (or at least his legal team may have). Who knows?
Here’s the Wikipedia page for Taxi Driver:
