TAKERS... I saw The Italian Job-ish bank heist film last weekend, and while it had a couple of unintentionally laughable moments in it, the movie was actually pretty decent. The main reason why I saw Takers—being a Star Wars nerd and all—was to see Hayden Christensen’s acting in the flick. The last movie I saw him in was, of course, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. I didn’t see Christensen’s last film Jumper (which came out in 2008), and judging from the score it received on Rotten Tomatoes, I didn’t miss out on much. In terms of Christensen’s acting in Takers, you really couldn’t compare it to his role as Anakin Skywalker...since all Christensen had to do in this latest flick was look cool in a zoot suit and drink a glass of martini. A scene where he beats the crap out of a couple of Russian dudes with a baseball bat is nothing compare to The Duel at the end of Revenge of the Sith. Anyways...
Dealing with the other characters in Takers, it’s always cool to see the gorgeous Zoe Saldana make an appearance in the movie. She was hot in last year’s Star Trek, and her beauty shined through her character Neytiri in Avatar (though I have no intention of seeing her pro-longed Na'vi sex scene in the Special Edition of Avatar that came out in theaters last weekend). Matt Dillon essentially reprised his role as a cop from 2005's Best Picture winner Crash, and it was with his scenes that I smirked a bit during the movie. Doesn’t Dillon’s character ever lock his car’s door when he’s driving? Hell— Even his daughter didn’t lock her door in that scene where Dillon was sharking that SUV Idris Elba and Paul Walker were cruising in. And why didn’t Dillon just ask his daughter to jot down the description of the SUV while he was driving? Way to endanger your child’s life by not keeping your eyes on the road, jerk. Speaking of Walker (Elba’s character was okay in the movie); I’m surprised he wasn’t revealed to be a cop since he acted just like his character in The Fast and the Furious films. I was waiting for a scene where he called up Vin Diesel to ask him to get rid of Chris Brown’s character. Speaking of Chris Brown...
On the positive side, Chris Brown was sorta convincing as the double-crossing ex-convict Ghost. On the negative side, the way he talked in the film was hilarious. Apparently, he decided out of the blue to channel Snoop Dogg the minute he got out of jail. Though after his famous real-life incident with the singer Rihanna, I didn’t find it farfetched that Brown would harm Saldana’s character (who was Ghost's GF before he got sent to prison) later on in the film. Saldana’s character ended up becoming engaged to Jake Attica (played by Michael Ealy)...whose brother Jesse (played by rapper T.I.) had the coolest but most laughable action sequence I’ve ever seen on the big screen.
Seeing as how Takers was executive-produced by T.I., I’m not a bit surprised that he would portray himself as a bank robber capable of going all Jackie Chan by jumping through small windows on kitchen doors, getting hit by cars but continuing to dash away from cops like he was Usain Bolt, jumping off a wall and flipping in the air like he was Jet Li, hopping on top of car after car like he was Spider-Man, and jumping two to three stories off a building and landing feet-first on top of another car like he was um...Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chuck Norris, Jason Statham, Spider-Man... Take your pick. Maybe T.I. will be in The Expendables 2 if it actually gets made. And you know that T.I. was lookin’ forward to that final scene where he and Ealy storm out of that building to make one last stand against the police. Guns a' blazing and dying in a hail of bullets... What more could a rapper want?
All-in-all, Takers was an OK film. Nice touch with that dramatic music score that plays when Chris Brown finally betrays Walker and Co. to those Russian mobsters in the Roosevelt Hotel. I gotta admit... I was rooting for Ealy when he sneaks up behind those mobsters in the hotel room and blows them away with a shotgun. I bet T.I. wished he was the one who unloaded that 12-gauge into those damn Bolsheviks. But I guess he preferred to have guns a' blazing and dying in a hail of bullets by the cops instead. That is all.
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