Relentlessly Obvious Takers Steals Goodwill
Gordon Jennings (Idris Elba), John Rahway (Paul Walker), A.J. (Hayden Christensen), Jake Attica (Michael Ealy) and his little brother Jesse (Chris Brown) form an elite unit of criminal masterminds who typically only take on one big score a year and then lay low, living the highlife built on the fruits of what they can take. After a phenomenally successful heist the group is ready for their vacation, but when former member of their team Ghost (Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris) suddenly wanders back into their lives fresh out of prison all bets are suddenly off.
Michael Ealy, Chris Brown, Idris Elba, Hayden Christensen and Paul Walker in Takers © Screen Gems
Even though none of them trust him, the job he’s proposing is so unbelievably lucrative even though every fiber of their collective beings tells the quintet to pass the potential payday clouds their reasoning almost forcing them to welcome him back into the team. But seasoned Los Angeles Detective Jack Welles (Matt Dillon) has caught their scent and is determined to bring this gang down, while the Russian mob isn’t exactly happy that Ghost has given their what they thought was their heist to another group entirely.
Wow. Where to begin. I guess the easy place to start here is to call Takers the most derivative and obvious thriller to not go directly to DVD in over a decade. For all intents and purposes this is a thinly veiled remake of Heat colored with elements stolen from True Romance, The Italian Job, Rififi, Scarface and pretty much all of John Woo’s Hong Kong crime story catalog. Not so much written (there are four credited screenwriters, including director John Luessenhop) as cut and pasted from a cavalcade of similar scripts this might be the most egregiously copycat motion pictures of all-time, watching it almost fodder for Cinema 101 students interested in finding out just how well they now their heist film history.
But just because it’s derivative doesn’t make it terrible. The majority of the picture is relatively skillfully made and taken far more seriously than it slightly deserves. The case is universally solid if unspectacular, and a few of the set pieces – most notably a rollicking foot chase involving Brown, Dillon and Jay Hernandez (playing a fellow detective with his own shady past) – border on the outstanding. The movie has energy and it sometimes has nerve, and for as overly familiar and predictable as it always is the one thing you can definitely say about the finished product is that it is seldom, if ever, boring.
Not that I have any intention of watching this picture ever again. At a certain point that whole thing just becomes laughable, not so much because everyone involved is taking it so freakishly seriously but because the movie just insists one becoming so gosh darn melodramatically silly. Starting with an insanely awful (if reasonably well staged) hotel shootout, moving along to a weird, completely undeserved antihero Butch and Sundance showdown, to finally culminating in a three-way standoff both Woo and Sergio Leone would openly laugh at, the movie devolves to the point where it all becomes downright pointless.
T.I. is listed as one of the producers and it must be said the final product, as much of a spotlight as he gives Elba and Dillon (and to a lesser extent Christensen and Ealy), kind of plays like a vanity project. He gets the best lighting, the majority of the best lines and if there are anything close to resembling quote-quote “signature” moments in the film he definitely has them all. Of course, the fact that he has the least screen presence of any of his costars kind of defeats the purpose behind doing that, almost all of the scenes concerning his character falling flat in a pseudo-silly faux macho posturing sort of way.
It should also be mentioned that although Zoe Saldana (playing Ealy restaurant manager girlfriend) is given prominent billing she’s not really in the movie. Now, I’m not sure if she asked to have her scenes excised realizing she needs to stop appearing in drivel like this or if the script always treated her with such outright womanizing disdain but either way her appearance is really nothing more than a glorified cameo. The actress is around, sort of, but she doesn’t do anything, meaning her paycheck must have been pretty awesome because otherwise I can’t quite figure out why she ever agreed to play the part in the first place.
I will say that the people who ultimately decided on the title certainly got that one right. This movies takes and takes and takes some more, boldly stealing from so many other pictures the 105-minutes of outright thievery borders on being impressive. Not that this should be construed as a compliment, it’s really more of an observation. But no matter how it’s taken the end result is still the same, the biggest heist Takers takes is on an unsuspecting audience expecting something original.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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