Taxi Driver 10 Movies That Are Unofficial Remakes

Taxi Driver: 10 Movies That Are Unofficial Remakes

Taxi Driver inspired many movies that came after it and Joker was just one of the more recent releases that have the Scorsese classic flick to thank.

You Are Reading :[thien_display_title]

Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s iconic 1976 character study stars the latter as disturbed Vietnam War veteran and insomniac, Travis Bickle, who spends his nights as a New York cab driver during the city’s bleakest hour.

Bickle is allured by the violence all around him and burgeoning within. The method actor transforming himself in a way that only he can during the onset of his eventual decades-long prime helped give birth to this very “type” of movie – one that requires actors – like those who front the films listed below – to sign off on confronting the duality of man before ever earning one shred of sleep.

10 Joker

Expected accusations of derivativeness aside, there is no denying that noted comedy director Todd Philips’ first full foray into dramatic filmmaking equally works as one part intentional Taxi Driver homage and one part capable of dancing on its own two feet while navigating a steep public staircase.

Joaquin Phoenix gave it his all in a well-earned Oscar victory as an ’80s-set reimagination of the eponymous Clown Prince of Gotham. And like Taxi Driver, fans are still debating just how real Joker’s ending can be – as both films proudly wield an unreliable narrator.

9 You Were Never Really Here

Phoenix drew praise a year prior for embracing the bleaker side of his performative repertoire in Lynne Ramsay’s film about a traumatized ex-mercenary hired by a politician to find his missing daughter and break up a human trafficking network by any means necessary.

Many reviewers agreed with The Chicago Reader, which posed that You Were Never Really Here modernized Taxi Driver’s “battered, walking adult casualty of war befriending a child victim of prostitution while on the path to requiem” basic plot premise.

8 Observe And Report

One should never reduce this Seth Rogen-led mall cop outing that beat Kevin James’ two-pronged Paul Blart saga to the broad comedy punch based on a simple scroll-by.

The film is infinitely more than meets the eye and the true descent of a complicated man (Rogen) with a hero complex that inspires him to often cross the line in his quest to use his protection-based, under-respected line of work to nab the mall streaker at large.

7 Big Fan

Despite hospitalization with severe injuries after he’s beaten up by his favorite player, obsessed New York Giants fan, Paul (Patton Oswalt), refuses to file lawsuits against Quantrell Bishop – desperate for the latter to return to game action as quickly as possible, rejecting, all the while, his own internalized pain and mental decay that culminates in an infiltration-based, Scorsesian behind-enemy-lines grand finale.

Like with Taxi Driver, audiences will find themselves questioning why they rooted for a stalker lead whose violent thoughts seep to the surface.

6 Chapter 27

Months after Mark David Chapman – the focus of Chapter 27, a Jared Leto-starring 2007 film – assassinated musician John Lennon outside his New York City apartment in 1980, John Hinckley Jr. too would dominate the headlines – though for a failed attempt on the life of the then-recently sworn-in president, Ronald Reagan.

Shortly after he was reprimanded, the eventually-acquitted-by-insanity-plea Hinkley professed he did so to impress Jodie Foster – an allusion to Iris’ (Foster) rapport with Travis (DeNiro), a failed politician assassination himself, in Taxi Driver.

5 The Machinist

If anyone can contend with Phoenix for the 21st century DeNiro mantle, it’s Christian Bale. The actor famously regarded for his shocking, extreme physical transformations outdid both DeNiro and even himself in 2004’s The Machinist.

No one could not predict the unsettling weight loss Bale would undergo to play Trevor Reznik – a fellow insomniac like Travis Bickle before him, so consumed with the darkness stirring in his mind that he and audiences alike often doubt what’s real and what isn’t.

4 Fight Club

Yet another restless and oh-so-untrustworthy narrator-driven picture, David Fincher’s 1999 culture definer somehow bombed at the box-office, yet it almost immediately rose to such cult heights that it’s a near-mainstream enterprise.

While Travis had taxi-driving, Betsy, and eventually protecting Iris – the protagonist (Edward Norton) of the similar jolt-to-one’s-consciousness Fight Club had support groups, Marla, the titular club one shant ever talk about, and eventually protecting the world from the chaos-spreading affairs of his renegade self.

3 Falling Down

The further William “D-Fens” Foster (Michael Douglas) travels in the late Joel Schumacher’s 1993 crime-thriller, the more apparent it becomes that he – albeit, in a shorter breath – is a Travis Bickle-adjacent figure.

RELATED: Every Joel Schumacher Movie Ranked From Worst to Best

Here, audiences were introduced to the character at an earlier starting point in the active evolution of a repressed man as he taps into his more violently-equipped identity. Societal loath-induced rage pours out with growing, demonstrative vigor as the film powers forward.

2 True Romance

The theater experience kicking a violent love story in motion. Sex workers. Pimps. Iconic gunfire. And a jarringly unexpected happy ending. Elements that equally describe both Taxi Driver and True Romance – made from a quasi-autobiographical screenplay written by Quentin Tarantino, a student of his fellow crime cinema aficionado, the elder Scorsese.

Was each ending mere fantasy? Or just what each respective film needed to put a bow on an otherwise unending certainty in real life: where the bad guy typically wins out over the righteous.

1 The King Of Comedy

Reclaimed by cinephiles everywhere to make up for its head-scratching poor reception at the time, Martin Scorsese could not resist the creative decision to push the dark comedy envelope in what he originally dubbed his post-Raging Bull palate cleanser.

Though going about his business with more smiles than his taxi-driving spiritual older brother, DeNiro’s Rupert Pupkin shares the latter’s contempt for both society and himself. He holds enough to take it one step further than Bickle, by following through on his plan to use a public figure (game show host Jerry Langford, instead of a politician) as a fast play to mold his lusted-after legacy, sooner rather than later.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/taxi-driver-joker-movies-unofficial-remakes/

• The Big Bang Theory 10 Reasons Why Penny & Howard Arent Real Friends

• SpiderWoman is Back! But Whats Wrong With Her

• The Dark Knight 10 Relentless Villains As Terrifying As The Joker

• Star Trek Lower Decks USS Cerritos Name Explained

• SpiderMan & Spawn Finally Team Up in Todd McFarlane Cover

• The 10 Scariest Entities In The Conjuring Universe Ranked

• Stranger Things Season 3 Trailer Breakdown 25 Secrets & Reveals