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