Angelina falls flat

Taking Lives is a foolish thriller full of actors who deserve better. Angelina Jol ie plays a star FBI profiler called to Montreal to help solve a series of murders involving a man who likes to adopt the identity of his victims, sometimes living for years with their clothes, credit cards and cars.

All the detectives solving the case (excellent French actors Tcheky Karyo, Olivier Martinez, Jean- Hughes Anglade) are a bit plodding - save Special Agent Jolie, who is a stern but ravishing genius.

Somewhere along the way, Ethan Hawke comes forward as a witness to one of the murders, and Jolie's growing attraction to him proves to be her Achilles heel. Still, she soldiers on, and the rain keeps falling, and the killer leaves a trail of revolting clues.

Showing admirable tenacity, the film's camera-crew tip-toe into bedsits and cellars in which designers have gone to town recreating the dank nightmare of the film Seven. Bits of people hang from walls - here a knuckle, there a chin - above plates of decaying food.

At first the camera notices everything, lingering on the smallest and gloomiest of details, like a depressed person whose life has been reduced to contemplating the many, wistful ways a human being leaves his or her mark on the world: a fingerprint in a pot of lipbalm, a slither of skin in the nail clipper. All of this is quite intriguing until director DJ Caruso forgets to keep it up.

Jolie wears an utterly deadpan expression and after a while you find yourself urging-her to be much more dynamic. She is simply too much of an actress to be this flat, and usually a gutsy, husky performer who over the years - thanks in part to her eccentric personal life - has built up much audience goodwill.

As this film (adapted from Michael Pye's intense novel) becomes more histrionic and unreliable you rather feel for her. Particularly during its central, sleazy love scene in which Jolie is stripped entirely by a man who then apparently penetrates her without taking off a single item of his clothes.

Seriously, this chap doesn't even undo his zip. I wonder what Erica Jong would have to say about that.