Life is too short for long names

Tate 2022-04-20 09:01:12

The story happened on a very ordinary night. Max, an ordinary old taxi driver, continued to struggle for his lofty dream, when Vincent, a white-haired man played by Tom Cruise, got into his car. At that time, it seemed to the audience that this night would become no longer normal. But at this time, everything seemed so comfortable. Max narrated his experience and talked about his dreams, while Vincent listened patiently, complaining about this indifferent city from time to time. In such a big city at night, two people are so ordinary and so lonely at the same time. This calm continued until Vincent reached his first destination.

At the nineteenth minute of the film, this kind of peace was suddenly shattered by a corpse that fell from the sky and smashed into the car window. Like Max, the audience also had the same wide-eyed eyes as him, looking at the bloody corpse. At the same time, Vincent rushed downstairs steadily, looking around alertly, while jokingly answering the incoherent Max's question: "I didn't kill him, I just shot him, the bullet killed him At this time, the film officially revealed to the audience Vincent's true identity - a killer, thus echoing the scene of Vincent's meeting at the airport at the beginning of the film. The atmosphere of the film also took a 180-degree turn from here and became unprecedentedly tense.
Vincent threatened Max to drive him to the location of several other targets, and the relationship between the two changed from driver and customer to coercer and coerced person.
As the assassination progressed, Max's sense of hatred and fear for Vincent increased exponentially with Vincent's ruthless methods and cruel methods. After all, for an ordinary taxi driver, all this It came too soon, he was just a low-level peasant who hoped to pay off his loan as soon as possible. The continuous killing scenes made him almost collapse. He tried to persuade and use his own way to prevent the continuation of this, but his strength Too weak, what he did only made him more passive. The film also seems to lead the audience to break the image of Tom Cruise's consistent "righteous man" and establish such a murderous villain as Vincent.

When Max's seriously ill mother called him several times to urge Max, the situation changed: Vincent decided to let Max take him to see his mother in order to avoid too much outside interference in his serial assassination plan. After arriving at the hospital, a small detail was very interesting: Vincent asked Max if he wanted to buy flowers for his mother, Max thought it was unnecessary, but Vincent blamed him: "Your mother suffered 9 to give birth to you. Months of sin." Max was overwhelmed by the sudden human touch of the killer, Vincent quickly added a sentence in order to cover up his inadvertently revealed human concern: "Normal people will buy flowers" and as an excuse for not getting attention. After meeting Max's mother, Vincent's caring and catering to her showed the audience the warmth hidden in a killer's heart. Since this warmth is not often revealed, the expression on this occasion is a bit blunt. .

After leaving the hospital, Vincent returned to his original cold-blooded and cunning, and asked Max to hand over the target's intelligence, thus focusing the police's attention on the taxi driver. The theme of killing with a knife is displayed. And Max gradually became bold from the initial fear and passivity, and he began to think of ways to challenge this cold-blooded animal and create chaos for him. When he discovers that Vincent's last target, Annie, was one of his earlier passengers, he can no longer listen to Vincent's threats, and he takes Annie to run for his life.
The ending of the film takes place in the deserted Los Angeles subway, Max leads Annie and Vincent to confrontation, Vincent threatens desperately: "I have to kill her, this is my job! If I don't kill her I will He will also die." After a while of shooting at the door, it was surprising that Vincent was shot, and he was dying by the window. Before he died, he only asked Max one sentence: "Someone is on the way. This subway, die here, do you think anyone will notice?" After Vincent died, Max took Annie away, and the film ended.
Vincent's last question came from a piece of news in his mouth at the beginning of the film: someone died suddenly on the subway, but after six hours, hundreds of people came and went on the train, and no one found him dead. I lament the indifference of human feelings in modern society. His questioning before his death echoed it, and it was bleak. When Vincent died, a billboard on the subway read: Life is too short for long names. Lament that life is so short and full of surprises. A person's life died silently like this, no one even cared, no one remembered it, no one shed tears. As a killer, Vincent collects money and sacrifices his life for others. Humanity is deeply buried by him, and loneliness is his synonym. Some people question that Vincent, a trained killer, can't kill a taxi driver with a gun for the first time, but in my opinion, Vincent didn't really want to kill Max, because he saw Max's kind and amiable. Mother, his humanity was just buried deep by him, not completely dead.
Life is too short for long nam


In my opinion, the biggest theme of this film is loneliness, Vincent is lonely, Max is lonely, the detective who was woken up by his boss in the middle of the night to investigate the case is lonely, and even Annie who came to the company late at night to work overtime is lonely Lonely. Although everyone who runs around in the city lives in the most densely populated area, his heart is the most empty. Although Vincent killed people, everything remained the same after his death. The sentence "Do you think anyone would notice?" before his death was a sad cry. Although it came from the mouth of a killer, it made people feel There was sympathy and even pity, accusing this indifferent society, and feeling unfair about his gloomy fate. Such questions also made Max speechless for a while, because he was not a person who was indifferent, at that moment. , Max also gradually disappeared his excitement, turned into a kind of emptiness and helplessness to reality. When he helped Annie out of the subway, the empty streets and the icy platform returned to the quietness and serenity at the beginning of the film, but with more coldness, the train carrying Vincent's body gradually moved on. Getting further and further away, the pale lights on the side of the road seem to be watching all this coldly.
Life is too short for long names. Life is short, human nature is forever.

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Extended Reading

Collateral quotes

  • Max: [In the dark] Let her go.

    Vincent: Max? Why? What are you gonna do about it?

    [He gets shot]

  • Sergeant: Put your gun down!

    Max: Get back put your hands down! Look,I gotta go!

    Sergeant: Put down the gun!

    Max: Stop moving! Stop moving. When did this become a negotiation?

    [Max makes the sergeant cuff himself to the crashed cab]

    Max: Clap your hands together. Hold your hands together. Listen, somebody's gonna get killed if I don't go right now. Now cuff yourself. I'm going to Sixth and Fig. Call the cops.