Taxi (1998) DVD Review

Taxi (1998) DVD Review

Written by samba Thursday, 26 June 2008 22:07

Taxi 1998 DVD Review

I Only recently watched Taxi, I had heard of it before and seen it in shops but was never tempted to buy it because it didn't have any "big name" actors in it, when i saw that Luc Besson (Léon, The Fifth Element) Wrote the screenplay that swung it for me, I Decided to grab a copy off Ebay and to my own surprise I really enjoyed it, the special effects are very good, there are lots of nice car chases and plenty of funny jokes to keep the pace of the story up. 

The DVD

I purchased the DVD of taxi that was released in 2005, It was Distributed by Prism Leisure who seem to have been going through a rough patch lately, they went into receivership about 18 months ago and don't seem to be distributing movies anymore and have moved onto music in the form of Cheap CD's.

The Movie is presented on a DVD-9 and has both versions of the film featured on 1 disc each about 3.5GB pretty much filling up the whole disc, firstly there is the English dubbed version which is pretty bad, It has a 4:3 aspect ratio and the dub loses all the charm of the movie, as well as losing most of the humour in the translation. I could only handle about 20 minutes of the dubbed version it was so cringeworthy, one notable aspect of the English dub (or maybe not) is that the voice actor of "paulo" sounds like Danny Dyer, im not 100% sure if its him as I cannot find any info about who did the voice acting for the movie and its not on his IMDB profile.

Here is a Youtube video Comparing both versions of the movie

The original French language version is superior to the Dubbed version in every way, it is still a 4:3 aspect ratio but it is letterboxed and the english subtitles are burned into the bottom black bar of the video, a full widescreen version would have been better with selectable subtitles but this is unlikely unless its released on Blu-Ray in the future.

Picture quality is pretty good, and the letterboxed widescreen version is considerably better than the fullscreen version, probably because the same video was used and they just zoomed in the letterboxed version until it fitted a 4:3 screen, the Sound stream is only Stereo but it sounds decent, where as the dubbed version sounds and looks very low quality in comparison.

In an ideal world they could have made 1 version of this movie that fitted on a DVD-9 with both audio tracks and selectable subtitles, this would have been much higher quality and so much better.

Disc Overview

Disk format : DVD-9 (3.5GB for each version of the movie)

Sound Format : Dolby Digital Ac3 Stereo

Languages : English and French

Subtitles : English (burned in)

Special Features : Movie Trailer