Takers, 2010.
Directed by John Luessenhop.
Starring Chris Brown, Hayden Christensen, Matt Dillon, Michael Ealy, Idris Elba, Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris, Jay Hernandez, Zoe Saldana and Paul Walker.
SYNOPSIS:
A team of professional thieves link up with a recently paroled former associate for one last spectacular robbery as an obsessive, hard-boiled police detective looks to bring the gang to justice.
Despite opening at the top of the US box office back in August last year, director John Luessenhop’s Takers went pretty much unnoticed when it received a theatrical release here in the UK a couple of months down the line and now comes to home video hoping to find an audience. On the face of it, the ingredients for success are there: Takers is a glossy action thriller with plenty of fast cars, shoot-outs and walking away from explosions by a ‘cool’ cast that includes the likes of Paul Walker (The Fast and the Furious) alongside hip-hop artists T.I. and Chris Brown, who also serve as executive producers. While that should be enough to appease younger action fans Luessenhop clearly has ambitions of replicating the Michael Mann school of crime drama, and in drawing too heavily from Heat – not to mention other popular heist movies such as The Italian Job, Ocean’s 11 and Point Break – the end result feels all too familiar.
While the ensemble cast features some big names, the star of the show here is English actor Idris Elba (28 Weeks Later, American Gangster and the upcoming Thor) as Gordon, leader of a gang of professional thieves, or ‘takers’. His highly disciplined crew – which includes A.J. (Hayden Christensen), John (Walker) and brothers Jake (Michael Ealy) and Jesse (Chris Brown) – have amassed a fortune from their intricately-plotted and spectacular heists, much to the displeasure of token police detectives Welles (Matt Dillon) and Hatcher (Jay Hernandez). Typically waiting up to a year between jobs, the gang opt to ride their luck when recently-paroled former associate Ghost (T.I.) offers them the chance of a huge score – raiding an armoured truck for $30m the following week.
As the crew begin to plan the heist, Welles finds a link between the gang’s most recent job and Ghost, who was incarcerated at the time of the robbery. Obsessed with bringing the gang to justice, Welles trails Ghost and begins to piece together evidence but he is unable to prevent them from successfully pulling off the raid and killing his partner in the process. Now of course it’s personal, but the gang find their problems compounded when Ghost’s true motives are revealed and he sets them up for a Mexican stand-off with Russian mobsters in the hope of securing the entire loot for himself.
Overall, Takers is a fairly generic heist thriller that sticks rigidly to the established formula, although the cast do a good enough job with their under-developed characters and there are a couple of exciting set-pieces that manage to elevate the film from your bog standard B-movie. The action moves along at a brisk pace and the robberies are well-realised, while there’s also a decent a parkour-inspired chase sequence featuring Chris Brown and a hotel room shoot-em-up that’s straight out of the True Romance playbook. The problem is they’ve all been done before, and done better, so while Takers is serviceable enough there’s nothing here that’s particularly memorable. However, genre fans will likely find enough to keep them entertained for the duration and if it’s a throwaway action thriller you’re after then Takers is worth a look.
Takers is out now on DVD and Blu-ray.
Movie Review Archive
Originally published February 7, 2011. Updated April 12, 2018.
