Takers (Review)

You know it’s never a good sign when you’re watching a movie and you can’t stop thinking of another one you’d rather be watching. Takers is the result of several people watching Michael Mann’s masterpiece Heat and thinking “Hey! We can do that!” and creating a film out of spare parts. As I watched Takers my thoughts often strayed to “Man, that Heat was a great movie. I’ll need to check that out again soon.” This would be fine enough if most of the performances in Takers seemed to be portraying actual humans instead of well-dressed, smooth-talkin’ pieces of cardboard.

The film begins, as all heist films do, with the first job. It all goes according to plan, they get their money and escape. It’s not long before the police are on the scene and we meet our world-weary cop with family troubles, played here by Matt Dillon. It is now his life mission to find these crooks, even if it means taking his daughter to tail one of them. The thieves themselves are played by Idris Elba, Paul Walker, Hayden Christensen, Chris Brown and Michael Ealy. In between heists they spend their time walking in slow motion and drinking. In fact, the amount of alcohol consumed by most of these characters would indicate they should be completely smashed most of the movie. I’d watch the crap out of that.

While celebrating victory after the opening heist, they reunite with Ghost, their ex-partner who just got out of jail. He is played by Tip “T.I.” Harris, who just got out of jail himself, funnily enough. He explains to them that there’s an opportunity of “the job of a lifetime” coming up and asks them to get the band back together. They agree, and the planning begins.

The acting is pretty horrendous all the way through, made all the more visible by the fact that the characters are written so that we could not care less about any of them. We are given a few personal details: a cop has a sick child, Idris Elba’s sister has a drug addiction, one has a girlfriend, but these are sad excuses for character development which are used merely as place setting for various plot developments in the third act, not to tell us anything about these people. The award for worst performance goes to T.I., who also serves as an executive producer (!) of the film. His lines don’t sound like dialogue so much as they sound like T.I. saying “Hey, this is my slick movie voice.” During the climactic heist scene T.I. turns sports broadcaster on us, describing the events with a regular peppering of s-words.

That doesn’t excuse everyone else, however. Paul Walker just kind of hangs out, and Hayden Christensen is exactly as good as you’d expect Hayden Christensen to be. Idris Elba is the best actor here, and he does the best job he can, but his character is pretty thankless. Matt Dillon is believable as well in his role as the cop who’s married to his job, but again it’s a character that's been done before. At least Chris Brown seems to be having some sort of fun, and he provides some laughs that are actually intentional. He even serves as the subject of the film’s most exciting chase sequence. On that note, I do have to give the film credit for picking up some steam as we entered the third act. The Chris Brown chase sequence is fun, and there’s a scene that takes a shockingly dark turn that I kind of appreciated, but the rest of this film is so by-the-numbers that it drove me mad.

We are supposed to care about the characters when we reach the end, I guess, but I know I didn’t. All I knew was that they all liked suits, cigars, booze, and robbin’ them banks. So when there is a hotel gunfight towards the end that’s right out of True Romance set to music that sounds like Celine Dion will be coming in at any second, I didn’t care who lived and died. I cared when I watched Heat because I had almost three hours to learn the codes and personalities of each character and develop sympathy for their various situations. Takers puts the slick robbers over here, the grizzled cops over there, and have them chase each other all the way to the Mexican standoff at the end. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was about to watch a heist film cliché-fest. Within five minutes, we get a slow motion shot of the robbers walking away from an exploding helicopter. I’ll leave it to you to guess if they flinch.

Rating: (out of 4)