Listen, I don’t mind any of the gender-swapping in this movie, but unfortunately, our villains were apparently only changed into women to satisfy the male gaze. I also don’t mind that the remake decided to put Queen Latifah, who’s by far the best thing about this movie, in the driver’s seat. But it’s super lame that we immediately hear her boss tell her in the first scene: “You’re the best man I’ve ever had.”
While the French film played on the sensitivities of Franco-German relations, the American version made their villains Portuguese because that’s also a language Bündchen speaks, I guess. Oh, and Fallon tries to bust a couple of drug dealers in his opening sequence while pretending to be Cuban and looking like this:
In the French original, we’re introduced to the incompetent “Muppet” cop as he’s failing his driver’s test and crashes into a bakery. In the American version, Fallon screws up a drug bust, gets his partner shot, then reverses into a corner deli while using… hand signals? That’s the remake’s biggest problem: If the jokes aren’t louder, dumber versions of its French counterpart, then we’re left with shots of Fallon’s butt in Latifah’s face.
20th Century Studios
Of course, the widely-panned movie didn’t stop any attempts at making Taxi a thing in the U.S. (it spawned another three movies in France, after all), and in 2014 NBC released Taxi Brooklyn, a French-American action-comedy police procedural so bad it didn’t make it past its first season.