Movie night: Takers

It was movie night at our friend's place tonight! I haven't seen them in a while and so even though I'm tired, we still went. The company was great; the movie, not so much.

We watched Takers. It's about a group of people, their heist, and the cops who are trying to catch them. On paper, this sounds like a pretty good premise but the finished product wasn't nearly so good. The problems were many: the acting, the script, the story, the editing, and the music.

The movie stars Chris Brown and Tip (T.I) Harris along with a bunch of others as the people setting up the heist and they're better at posing and being all rapper-tough than actually acting. Maybe that's the fault of the script; after all, the cops (one of which is played by Matt Dillon) have pretty bad dialogue, too.

I could possibly overlook the strange acting if the story made sense. It's got a lot of holes in it and there are a lot of scenes that are completely unnecessary. If those scenes were cut the movie would only be about an hour long so maybe that's why they were kept.

The editing is also a bit strange in that the timing feels off. Someone would say something and then there would be a pause while the camera focused on them before shifting the focus to the other person. This is a technique that works well for emotional dialogue, where the actor has to portray depth or feeling or something. It doesn't work so well here, though, especially for dialogue like, "How you doing, G?" when entering the hangout.

Finally, the music was almost always there and not just during action scenes when it would be expected. There was even music during some dialogue scenes.

Aside from all of those problems, Takers is still mostly watchable. I wouldn't recommend that you seek it out but if it happens to be on the tv and you're bored then you might enjoy this one. There is some violence, mostly with guns, but there was no real sex in this one so it could easily show up on a tv station near you.