Movie Review: Takers

by KYW's Bill Wine --

Takers is a wish-fulfillment heist thriller that fulfills very few of our wishes.  Any takers?

"We're all takers," says one thief in Takers to another.  "It's what we do."

Well, we're all watchers.  It's what we do.  And we wish that what we were watching took us somewhere else.

Idris Elba, Paul Walker, Hayden Christensen, Chris Brown, and Michael Ealy are well-heeled, Los Angeles-based bank robbers who have pulled off several elaborately and painstakingly planned, precisely executed heists to support their lavish lifestyle.

These walking metaphors for the productive and goal-achieving application of expertise break the law, all right, but they're good at what they do, they don't leave fingerprints behind, they don't get caught, and they live the way they want to.

Their latest gig, suggested by a recently paroled former colleague who's done time and feels they owe him money and maybe a lot more, is a loose cannon played by Tip "T.I." Harris (right).  The target is an armored car and the job has to be pulled off in just five days, rather than the customary year they usually take between jobs to allow for adequate research and preparation.

But there's so much money involved -- $30 million -- that they proceed anyway.

Meanwhile, LAPD cops Matt Dillon and Jay Hernandez stay on their darn-difficult-to-determine trail.

And just as the screen time is split between the cops and the robbers, so is our focus and emotional investment split in ways that keep us at a distracting distance.

Zoe Saldana and Marianne Jean-Baptiste are also along for the ride -- the former as the lover of one thief and the ex of another, the latter as the drug-addicted sister of the team's leader.  But the screenplay has little time for the female part of the equation.

On paper the screenplay, which director John Luessenhop (Lockdown) co-wrote with Peter Allen, Gabriel Casseus, and Avery Duff, would seem to have at least a modest number of narrative wrinkles, idiosyncratic relationships, and situations suggesting suspense to hold our attention.

Unfortunately, the director undermines his own story with wholly unnecessary, ridiculously restless, headache-inducing camerawork -- a zoom-happy approach of shaky-cam instead of steady-cam that makes us want to donate a tripod to the cause -- and an offputtingly frantic editing rhythm that bespeaks desperation and a lack of trust in the material.

It's a combination of hipper-than-thou attitude and shallower-than-thou style that results in a lousier-than-thou finished product.

The commercial-resembling approach doesn't call for (or even allow) real acting, and the cast is thus severely underemployed.  Dillon and Elba, for example, are actors who usually know how to commandingly hold us and the screen, but they're not given the chance to build or display characters here, much to the film's detriment.

The opening sequence involves a cleverly executed heist that gets our hopes up.  But nothing following it comes anywhere near that level of creativity or originality.

By Act III, the script has completely given up on itself and overblown, shoot-em-up chaos has replaced any attempts at cerebral stimulation.

Formerly titled Bone Deep (which the film certainly is not), Takers exits with a fuzzy, ambiguous ending that, in trying to have it both ways, ends up having neither and being nowhere at all.

So we'll steal 1½ stars out of 4 for this thin, inferior caper flick.  Takers is a cops-and-robbers thriller that cops out and robs us of any rooting interest.