Derivative ‘Takers’ Exhausts All Heist Movie Clichés

Heist flicks have always followed a formula. A team of thieves joins together and devises the perfect plan to steal a huge payload. Inevitably, something goes wrong during the job, igniting a race against time/the police/whoever betrayed them as they vie to make it out alive and with the money. There’s not a problem with the formula, but when a film follows it to a T without bringing something fresh to the table, and blatantly rips off of other, better movies, that’s when the heist genre is relegated to mediocrity like “Takers.”

The film opens with a skyscraper robbery, wherein a team of professional thieves (played by Paul Walker, Idris Elba, Hayden Christensen, Michael Ealy and Chris Brown) enjoys the rewards of a successful heist. That is until recently released Ghost (rapper Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris, recently released from prison in real life, too), a former team member of theirs who got caught on a previous job, approaches them with an opportunity to rob an armored truck carrying $20 million.

The catch: they only have five days to prepare and they’re unsure if they can trust Ghost. In addition, a pair of detectives (Matt Dillon and Jay Hernandez) are investigating the skyscraper robbery, hot on their tail.

Despite the risks, the team takes the job, and anyone who’s ever seen a heist film can easily guess where it goes from there, especially anyone who’s seen the crime epic “Heat” and/or “The Italian Job.” The real agenda of “Takers” doesn’t seem to be about the characters stealing money, but about the movie stealing the structure, plot points and characters of these two far superior heist flicks.

Copying off of such great material, you’d think that writers Peter Allen, Gabriel Casseus, Avery Duff and co-writer/director John Luessenhop would at least be able to produce something exciting to make up for the lack of originality. Unfortunately, Luessenhop’s style of jittery, never-ending quick cuts and overuse of shaky-cam keep viewers from becoming engaged in the action, more often just leaving them wondering what’s going on.

Seeing as how the writers struggled to come up with their own story and only created hackneyed, underdeveloped characters, it’d definitely be too much to expect serviceable dialogue. Many conversations either abound with clichés or are just plain annoying. The latter usually involve T.I., who fails to ever make his performance anything beyond irritating and vacuous.

In the sequence where the team ambushes the armored truck, T.I. describes every action the audience is seeing onscreen into his comm radio (“Aw mann, watch out fo’ these guys!”). What a shame, because this is one of the few set pieces that’s moderately cool, but it loses half its entertainment value due to the rapper’s inane running commentary.

But the other musician in the movie, Chris Brown, turns in the biggest surprise. He’s likable and fun to watch, and almost redeems himself for his infamous behavior against Rihanna through a parkour-styled foot chase. Agilely running through the subway, streets and jumping from roofs, this sequence makes for the only legitimately thrilling part of the film, and helps elevate the second half of “Takers” to watchable status, until it starts falling apart at the end.

Few of the other actors leave much of an impression, however. Walker simply plays his “Fast and Furious” character again, and Ealy feels overly serious. Elba, on the other hand, emanates coolness by speaking in his natural cockney accent, taking charge of the robbers, while Christensen drops his Anakin Skywalker whining routine to prove himself a charming presence.

Both of the detectives play their stereotypes well, but Dillon’s done this part several times before and he’s obviously tired of it here. Hernandez performs competently beside him, but fails to make his character stand out. For such a star-studded cast, there was a lot of potential in this genre piece, but Luessenhop fails to take advantage of all the talent on display.

Earlier this summer, “Inception” treated moviegoers to a completely unique and original heist experience. Now, at the end of the season, “Takers” slaps us with the antithesis of that, a humdrum heist flick that can’t even steal its ideas from other movies without screwing them up.

Don’t let this botched robbery take your money.

One and a Half out of Four Stars