Takers Full Online Movie Review

Sep 3
07:27

2010

Johnny J Lee

Johnny J Lee

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Takers wants to be a cool,Takers Full Online Movie Review Articles hip armored car heist movie but ends up just a collection of  overused cliché’s and bad acting. That’s the real crime here as a potentially good story was wasted. Watch Takers online and judge for yourself.

 

Director John Luessenhop should have spent more pre-production time watching the best cops and robbers movie of all time … HEAT. That epic heist movie starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro knew how to build and carry suspense. Luessenhop could also have learned how to shoot action sequences.

 

Takers is about a gang of chic bank robbers out for one last score, and the tireless, obsessed detective determined to do anything to stop them.

 

Showing that all robbers don’t look like vagrants, live hand-to-mouth or spend their last dollar on cheap booze, the thieves in Takers all look as though they belong to a “pretty-boy” club, wear well tailored and expensive suits, drink the most expensive alcohol, drive the most exotic cars and have the best looking girlfriends. Oh yeah, and to show they have a heart, they always donate a portion of their ill gotten gains to charity.

 

This Los Angeles gang is made up of leader and mastermind Gordon, played fantastically by Idiris Elba. Gordon is by far the best developed character on the bad guy side. We see him interact tenderly with his sister who is currently in rehab, and as a result of these scenes the audience can actually care something about what happens to him. Michael Ealy and Chris Brown play gang members and brothers Jake and Jesse. They apparently have some type of complicated relationship, but the film never explores it. Paul Walker is the 4th member and Gordon’s second in command, but really does nothing but hang around looking good. The fifth member is Darth Vader himself, Hayden Christensen, who acts as the crew’s main strategist. Christensen is a better actor than a lot of people give him credit for, but this is not the role that proves it. It seems that his main objective is to make sure he is never without his porkpie hat.

 

The movie starts when a former crew member Ghost, played by Tip “T.I.’’ Harris, suddenly reappears after a lengthy prison sentence. During his time incarcerated he hatched a plan to pull off a daring armored car heist, and the window of opportunity is quickly closing. He returned to recruit his old pals into one last “job”, one that would pull in $25 million dollars.

 

Gordon is immediately against doing this job. The crew normally does only one job a year, and it is always meticulously planned down to the minute. The gang prides themselves on stop-watch timing and never getting anyone hurt. This job would have to be attempted before they had time to carefully plan out every possibility. But T.I. is persistent and points out that he did his jail time alone, without ratting out any other gang member … so they owe him. Gordon acquiesces and agrees to go forward with the heist.

 

Meanwhile, detective Jack Welles, played by Matt Dillon, is the stereotypical obsessive cop with the busted family life who lives for his job. A border-line rouge lawman, he is forever holding off Internal Affairs while he pieces together far-flung pieces of evidence to solve a crime.  When he catches wind of the heist, he and his partner (Jay Hernandez) start bending and breaking rules to try and stop this gang of thieves.

 

Matt Dillon is a superb actor with a very large and impressive body of work. So why a director would anchor him with some of the worst dialog of recent years is astounding. To Dillon’s credit, he almost pulls it off. But even his talent can’t completely wipe away bad writing.

 

So basically we have a story of good-looking gentlemen bandits with hearts of gold out to do one last job while an aging, lonely, obsessive rogue cop tries to stop them. Yes, we’ve heard it all before.

 

Unfortunately a cliché script is only the beginning of this movie’s problems. Aside from the bad acting and terrible dialog is the amateurish camerawork. Much of this movie is chase scenes, robberies and fighting, but they are filmed with a shaky, hand-held camera. The director and cameramen were obviously not skilled enough to pull this off because there are many scenes where the audience can’t tell what is going on. The camera moves too much to see the action. There are some scenes where you can’t even be sure who the actors are in the shot.

 

Overall Takers is a disappointment.

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