Takers (**½)

Directed by: John Leussenhop

Starring: Matt Dillon, Paul Walker, Hayden Christensen, Chris Brown, Michael Ealy, Idris Elba, T.I., Jay Hernandez, Zoey Saldanha, Johnathon Scheach, Steve Harris

Seen: October 31^st 2010

**½ Out of ****

Takers is one of those below-the-radar action caper movies that is better than expected but still not all that good when the dust settles. Gordon Cozier (Elba), John Rahway (Walker), A.J. (Christensen), and brothers Jake (Ealy) and Jesse (Brown) are a tight-knit group of con-men – expertly pulling of a $2 million heist from a high rise banking building as the movie starts. Back at the club (proverbially speaking) the group are living the good life, each one has a smart car and they rock up in smart suits. Jake and Lily (Saldanha) are a committed couple, and life is looking good for the crew.

Investigating the heist are detectives Jack Welles (Dillon) and Eddie Hatcher (Hernandez), but they are left with little in the way of clues apart from the crew members’ body language and gestures, as they were wearing masks during the robbery and covered their tracks pretty well. Ghost (T.I.), an old member of the crew, gets released from prison after serving 5 years, being the only one to get caught during one of the crew’s earlier heists, and he takes no time in setting up a big score too good for the crew to pass, $20 million. Quick but decent planning lead up to a large-scale plan for the heist, and the team must roll with the punches as things inevitably start going awry.

Takers features some very tense and well orchestrated sequences, with the only, but rather lengthy reprieve coming between the initial movie-opening robbery and the big final robbery and conclusion. The quiet time is used to set up the robbery and to indicate some of what detectives Welles and Hatcher experience in their attempts to actually find the crew. The action sequences are never not 100% adrenaline-laced, but the big foot-chase is so wildly edited that through the shaky-cam and quick-cuts it’s hard to know exactly what goes on and almost as hard to not become nauseated. This could have been fantastic had the viewer been let in on it in a viewable way.

The final heist is magnificent as it features pyrotechnics, quick thinking and spectacle. The team work together sweetly with Ghost the only piece of grit thrown in, the returned member having difficulty letting go of his solitary confinement while the others were free. Hatcher and especially Welles’ police work is well-presented with no extraordinary leaps of imagination to arrive at conclusions, these leads are hard-fought for and investigated to their origins even harder.

Where things start to unravel is right after the final heist, where the getaway just can’t seem to go right for the crew as too many parties start getting involved with too many different points of view as things go along. The biggest part of the movie turns out to be just another part of the build up to a gunfight that, while very well presented, doesn’t do what lead up to it justice. The ending has a messy feel to it that probably brings it closer to something that might actually happen, but it is just left there with nothing to ground it all into a sensible ending. Takers is a high-octane action heist movie that will leave only die hard action junkies satisfied while most others will feel that many opportunities were missed.