In the very first scene of “Takers,” Matt Dillon sits back in the passenger seat of a car headed down a dark tunnel. He sips from a water bottle, aching, looking weary and battered, as his partner drives. It works well enough as an unassuming first moment until you realize the sequence has multiple coverage from what feels like a hundred angles edited together, enough so that Dillon takes two water swigs almost simultaneously. Add to this the cheap-looking DV bathing the scene in swimming pool blue and Dillon’s partner noting, “You look like shit,” and you kind of see the level “Takers” is working at.
Dillon heads this ensemble as a workaholic cop, not at all attached to our title characters but somehow overcome by the need to stop them. Amon g his concerns are a daughter he can’t make time for, an absentee wife, and a partner struggling to make payments to save his cancer-afflicted son. That sounds like enough for three movies at least, if not a TNT series.
Except those aren’t even the movie’s main story lines. Dillon’s dogged pursuit is of the flashy clan who just ripped off $2 million from an LA bank and escaped (magically?) on a news helicopter. Did you guess that they walk away nonchalantly as the helicopter blows up? These are the Takers, a mixed-race group of criminals who, as longtime associates, reunite to pull off one heist per year to support what seems to be a flashy lifestyle.
This lifestyle hits a roadblock when an old acquaintance pinched in a previous job emerges from prison. Still bitter about how they’ve parted, he nonetheless proposes another score: a midtown armored car heist to the tune of $45 million. Is this shifty-eyed loose cannon reliable? A clue is in the casting: He’s played by tough guy rapper Tip “T.I.” Harris with an insta-sneer, in a performance that reflects an intelligent physicality stuck behind a grating line delivery.
“Takers” shot itself in the foot long ago in the casting process, assembling a cast of mediocre-to-terrible actors to try to bring this ostensible epic to life. Michael Ealy and pop singer Chris Brown play brothers, which seems right given the similar diamond-headed features of both, though it’s clear which one is the professional musician. Hayden Christensen is thoroughly unconvincing as the team’s muscle given that he looks about 100 lbs. here and dresses like he’s in a boy-band, and his mannered slang and spray-on tattoos remind us that he’s less a trained actor and more like an enterprising young man who said the right things to George Lucas a decade ago.
As the harried good guy, Dillon is every cop cliché imaginable, but in essence he’s an actor of limited range tasked with carrying out a host of emotions. He’s paired with a true junior leaguer in Jay Hernandez, whose skill set is best saved for a distaff procedural during pilot season. And we’ve gotten to the point with Paul Walker where it physically hurts to watch him try to act. Seeing Walker compose sentences is like watching the mentally disabled attempt to play Tetris. At one point, when mentioning the details of a bank account, the visibly-taxed thesp seems like he’s going to collapse from the onslaught of dialogue.
The single human element in “Takers” emerges from Idris Elba, here playing the leader of the clan. Using his natural accent, Elba finally has a role that showcases both his guarded machismo and natural charisma, which haven’t been readily apparent in the lineup of dreck he’s slogged his way through since the end of “The Wire.” His predicament involves a sensitive relationship with his drug-addict older sister who he’s financially supported their entire lives. She’s played by Mike Leigh regular Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and with only a few sideways glances, she hints at a fascinating survivalist narrative this movie has zero interest in. The scenes between Elba and Jean-Baptiste bubble over with sibling rivalry, class tension and the loaded fear of financial insecurity, and had there been more of this subplot, “Takers” would be more than a forgettable time-waster.
“Takers” is content to meander during the heist-plotting sequences, but once they pull off the job, there’s a half-decent 20 minutes or so of straight action where the film threatens to come alive. Unfortunately, director John Luessenhop made the amateurish decision to shoot in muddy, sub-Mike Figgis digital video, which combined with the quick cuts and unnecessary editing, leads to an image littered with vomitous pileups of nondescript colors and shades. We want to say a 10-minute Parkour chase was exciting. We can say it was relentless, and fast-paced. Mostly, it was an undistinguished visual blur.
Once the action subsides, Luessenhop steers the material towards Michael Mann-style crime tragedy, but it’s hard to care for these characters when we know so little about them. While their excesses are flaunted in music video montages, these characters have no inner lives. Clearly, they are rich beyond imagination. So why keep arranging heists every year? The thrill of pulling off a job makes sense, but none of these guys seem to have that sort of drive, and it’s not political, as they don’t discriminate between targets. So if they don’t have trouble paying the bills, and they don’t have a competitor’s spirit, why even continue this lifestyle? At the start, our characters have no motivations, and once their cohort returns from prison, they have even less incentive to agree to his crazy plan. For the record, “Animal Kingdom” does this 10 times better. Hopefully it’s playing at a theater near you.
Luessenhop and his co-writers only deal in movie language. These characters take their cues from crime films past and present, not from actual human behavior or natural melodrama. Nothing in “Takers” feels fresh or original, owing debts to not only the Mann body of work (even jacking Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke’s “Sacrifice” for its climax), but also to flashier pictures like “Scarface” in how it embellishes the crime lifestyle as merely another form of brotherhood. “Takers” embraces the modern crime myth, but beyond the glamour, it’s just another extended music video. And the music isn’t even that good. [C-]
