Takers

            Going into the movie Takers I thought it would take a couple hours of my time and waste it so that I'd regret having lost that amount of my life. However, that is not how I felt when the movie came to an end...thankfully. All prejudice of the movie aside, it did turn out to be a fun heist movie that was entertaining.
             Takers is your pretty typical heist movie. You've got a group of thieves that have a couple of cops after them while they deal with some internal conflicts as well. In this case your takers include Idris Elba (Charles in The Office), Paul Walker, Chris Brown, Hayden Christensen, Michael Ealy (Californication, Miracle at St. Anna), and T.I.  Matt Dillon and Jay Hernandez (Friday Night Lights) play the two cops on their tail from beginning to end.
              The movie begins with the takers, minus Ghost (T.I.), pulling off a pretty clever and well executed bank robbery. This of course brings in detectives Welles and Hatcher (Dillon and Hernandez) to investigate. Welles is the loose cannon, married to the job cop dealing with Internal Affairs while Hatcher is his more level headed partner. After the initial robbery is where Ghost comes into play as he is recently paroled from prison and a former member of the team of takers, that got caught on a job in the past. He comes to the team not only to collect his money from the job he was caught on, but to pitch a new job of robbing an armored truck.
               If this sounds familiar it's because this is what they did in The Italian Job. However, I enjoyed the fact that they didn't ignore this as Ghost makes the joke, "Let's Italian Job their ass." This wasn't the only similarity to past movie of robbers and thieves. Later on they pull a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid moment as well that I thought was pretty cheesy.
              Anyways, the conflict of the movie of course revolves around the cops getting closer and closer to catching the group, as well as the difficulty of pulling off the new job and whether or not the crew can trust their old associate Ghost. The acting in this movie was far from spectacular, but that was expected with newbies Chris Brown and T.I.  involved as well as Paul Walker who I swear gets jobs just to show up and look pretty for the girls. That aside I thought the new guys did a decent enough job and Chris Brown did have a pretty entertaining chase scene where he's free running all over LA.
               In the end, the film's plot was better than expected with a couple turns I didn't see coming, but still not too complex. It definitely had its holes and the ending left me asking, "Really? Just like that?" It seemed forced and not very realistic. But the film had its moments as the heist and chase scenes are entertaining and filled with action.
               The movie is PG-13 and runs 107 min which is probably 17 min too long. I've decided to give the movie 1 1/2 stars out of 4 and a thumb in the middle due to its holes and lack of originality. A thumbs down I feel like represents me saying don't see it, but I feel like if you like heist movies then you'll probably be entertained about the same amount I was and I don't feel like I wasted my time despite the low rating. Definitely Netflix or Redbox it to save yourself the most money however.

My next review will be of the movie From Paris with Love starring John Travolta

Miracle at St. Anna - More like a miracle it was made

                 My first review is going to be for the 2008 Spike Lee Joint, Miracle at St. Anna. This movie is based off of a book by James McBride of the same name. I won't give away too many details, but try to give you a rough outline of the story and how things went wrong. It is a WWII movie set in Tuscany in 1944 with a group of four Buffalo Soldiers. The story centers around one of the four soldiers telling his story to a reporter, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in the present day.
                 Now first off, the movie is 2 hours and 40 minutes long, which is long in general for movies, and this one makes you suffer to last through the entire thing. The movie starts off with a bang, literally, and hooks you into the story and all of the mysterious elements that you realize will take the entire movie to uncover. Yet, at this moment in time you're okay with it. The first hour of the movie goes by pretty smoothly with Spike transitioning the viewer nicely from the present to past and demonstrating some of the terrible blatant racism that Buffalo Soldiers had to go through during WWII. However, it's around the time the 4 soldiers get separated from the rest of their company do things start to go downhill.
                  From this point on there are many flat points in the dialogue as well as plot. It makes the viewer wonder why this part of the story is taking so long and/or couldn't they have skipped this part all together. Through and the through the last hour and forty minutes drags along and when you finally hit the end you're excited to get all of the mysteries brought forth earlier solved. Yet, all that comes of it is disappointment from some lame cheesy ending that also is told with lack of detail, which makes it seem very implausible.
                   Some good things however about this movie I would say was the acting. Derek Luke, known as Boobie Miles from Friday Night Lights and Sean Combs in Notorious, did quite a good job of playing the officer in charge in an unknown situation thrust upon him. Laz Alonzo, also seen in season 4 of Californication, does a very good job of playing the arrogant horny asshole soldier.
                    In the end, this is obviously not a movie I would recommend as the length and plot really take any enjoyment out of this movie. So watch at your own risk. Who knows you could think I'm completely wrong and love it. You won't though.