Fallon Hails 'Taxi's' Frisky Frisk

Oct. 8, 2004 — -- If you're hoping to catch a comedy called Taxi in theaters this weekend, the joke's on you if you expect to see Latka and Louie De Palma.

The film opening today isn't a remake of the hit TV show, but Jimmy Fallon is promising a cast of even stranger characters — including supermodel Gisele Bundchen as a bank robber.

Fallon plays a bumbling New York City cop who loses his driver's license after his incompetence behind the wheel results in the death of a parrot. So he ends up in the back of Queen Latifah's cab, chasing four female bank robbers from Brazil, with Bundchen as the leader.

Taxi is based on a 1998 French comedy about a pizza delivery boy who becomes a cabbie, only to end up helping a detective chase a gang of German criminals.

"We've changed a lot," said Fallon, 30. "For one thing, our bank robbers are Brazilian."

"I think the one thing that a lot of people don't understand, and that the media tries to keep out of the news, is that 75 to 80 percent of all bank robbers are Brazilian supermodels," he said.

"It's a huge problem in America, and I tried to get Michael Moore to do a documentary on it, but he hasn't called me back."

What the former Saturday Night Live comic is actually saying is that the American adaptation was modified for him and Latifah, and, of course, Bundchen, the 24-year-old Brazilian who is best known for her modeling work for Victoria's Secret and as the girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio.

This is Bundchen's feature film debut, and when not robbing banks, she spends a fair amount of screen time strutting around in bikinis. Fallon says she was quite a presence of the set.

In perhaps the most provocative and funny scenes in the new movie, Bundchen frisks actress Jennifer Esposito, who plays one of Fallon's fellow officers.

"It was pretty wild and Gisele was cool about it, too. We didn't know how she was going to be, maybe like the stereotypical bimbo," Fallon said. "But it turns out, she probably acted better than I did."