TAKERS (2010) - Plagiarizing Better Movies 101

I'll be completely honest and just state the truth: I was convinced this movie would be a piece of crap from the minute I saw the trailer a few months back. Everything I read or heard about the premise of John Luessenhop's movie sounded too close for comfort to one of my favorite movies of all time and a true crime film classic, Michael Mann's Heat. I skipped out on watching it in theaters, and figured I'd scope it out later DVD. Well, the day arrived and I decided to approach the movie with an open mind, however hard that would be. I took comfort in the fact that Matt Dillon and Idris Elba, who did such an awesome job as Stringer Bell in The Wire, were in this. It couldn't be all that bad, now could it?

Paul Walker and T.I. in the same movie?!? Quick, get the Oscars ready...

The opening scenes introduce the crew of robbers as they pull off a quick orchestrated bank heist in downtown Los Angeles. Gordon (Idris Elba), John (Paul Walker), Jake (Michael Ealy) and Jesse (Chris Brown) don ski masks, grab assault rifles and make off with a good haul of cash, while A.J. (Hayden Christensen) steals a news helicopter to make their escape. High fives all around and a obligatory slow-motion explosion of the helicopter as the team walks off in different directions. And there is our crew of stylish, suave group of would be criminal masterminds.

While Gordon and his boys are off blowing their cash on girly drinks at a nightclub, detective Jack Wells (Matt Dillon) and his partner Eddie (Jay Hernandez) are busy beating the daylights out of drug dealers somewhere across the city. Jack, as we soon find out, is a no-frills cop with an eye for detail and a troubled family life. Jack and Eddie are assigned to investigate the bank robbery, and are initially stumped. At the same time, we see a guy named Ghost (T.I.) being released from jail and immediately looking to reunite with Gordon and his former crew.

Cool guys don't look at explosions.

Ghost joins the rest of the "takers" at the club, where he proposes a new job that offers a ton of cash, but warns them that they'll be on a tight schedule. His plan is to rob an armored truck loaded with millions of dollars in plain daylight with less than a week to prepare, thanks to inside information given to him by a Russian mob connection. The crew reluctantly agrees to take on the new heist, although some of the guys don't trust Ghost, especially Jake, who has just proposed to Ghost's ex girlfriend.

As the team prepares themselves for the job, the detectives are hard at work trying to solve the first robbery and looking for leads. After a routine bust, Jake and Eddie find evidence linking Ghost to the Russian mob. Jake tails Ghost and eventually sees him meet with Gordon and Jesse. As Jake continues to get closer to solving the case, the day of the heist arrives and ultimately results in a hectic web of betrayal, some obvious twists, and a few genuinely interesting action set pieces.

Matt Dillon's pimp hand is feeling mighty strong these days.

Before I proceed to vent out my frustrations with what could have been a decent heist movie, I'll blurt out the good to be found in this flick. There's a very cool foot chase between the two detectives and Chris Brown's character, which lasts an eternity and has some parkour moves a la Casino Royale's opening credits and is generally exhilarating. Idris Elba did not disappoint and was the highlight of the movie with a good performance limited only by this terrible script. Matt Dillon held his own as well, but that's about as far as it gets. On to the problematic...

Let's all chill together at da club after committing some felonies, yo.

Chris Brown and T.I. cannot act to save their life. Brown is atrocious. This should come as no surprise seeing as how Paul Walker and Hayden Christensen, who are also terrible, are part of this cast. The editing is dizzying and the action suffers from the schizophrenic camera. One promising shoot out scene is ruined by some excessive slow-motion and an even worse soundtrack choice. Speaking of choices, someone ought to bitch slap the guy behind this script. It's as if he decided to one day gather every possible action movie cliche and write a needlessly complex and uninspired plot around them. What's worse, there are almost whole sections of dialogue, characters, and even action scenes lifted from other movies.

The armored car robbery plays out like a straight rip off of the much more exciting finale in The Italian Job. Matt Dillon's detective investigating the robbery is divorced and having trouble being a good father to his daughter, just like Al Pacino's character in Heat. At the scene of the initial robbery, Jake comments on the technical proficiency of the robbers and their use of shaped charges and C4... wait for it... just as Pacino does in Heat. The lines sound almost exactly the same. The opening bank robbery is eerily similar to the Heat's famous bank robbery, even down to the guns the characters use, their outfits and the stuff they say.

I mean, even the blueish hue to the scenes is blatantly lifted from Mann's movie. Except that in Heat, it fit the minimalist, loner characterization of De Niro's role and the bleak portrayal of a decadent Los Angeles, while the guys in Takers hit up a nightclub after their heist and hook up with chicks, smoke cigars and sip scotch like a scene out of Jersey Shore. The only thing missing was for DJ Pauly D to make a cameo appearance and start bumping some beats. All flash and absolutely no dash.

Sadly, this would only have improved this disaster of a movie.

I vainly held hope that it would turn out to be decent, and it crashed and burned.Takers is shamelessly derivative to a fault and has very little going for it. It's a dumbed down, MTV version of better films that deserves to be shown on basic cable and nothing else. Wooden cast (save for Elba and Dillon), wooden story, and only one or two passable action scenes to keep you interested. If you're in the mood for a good heist/crime drama, watch The Town, or even better, rent or stream Heat. Give this piece of crap a wide berth.

TL;DR - A rip off of better crime movies, but with a bad cast, bad writing and no shame whatsoever. Yes, I mad. - 2/10

FOUR BROTHERS (2005) - Marky Mark.... in the hood.

Mark Wahlberg is one of those guys that you either love or hate. He has made a few good movies, a few terrible ones, and generally gets along rather well on his charisma. His role as the foul mouthed Sgt. Dignam in The Departed was pure gold, and of course everyone remembers his Dirk Diggler from Boogie Nights. I generally find him to be good fun whenever he's in a movie, and most of his action flicks are pretty decent. Four Brothers is a solid revenge movie with a capable cast and an interesting plot, although in the end it's not exactly memorable. It's like that one girlfriend you had ten years ago, who was pretty cute and she might have even been funny or good at Super Smash Bros, but you're hard pressed to remember her name. Yeah, like that.

Why don't they brainstorm indoors? It's cold outside yo!

The movie opens with Evelyn Mercer, an older woman who has adopted several hoodlum kids in the past, doing some shopping at a Detroit convenience store. Two masked robbers run in and force the cashier to empty the register, and on their way out, kill Evelyn and the employee. A few days later, we find out that Evelyn's adopted children, now grown up, are back in town for the funeral. Bobby (Wahlberg), Angel (Tyrese Gibson), Jeremiah (André Benjamin) and Jack (Garrett Hedlund) are confused and wondering why Evelyn was shot in such a random manner. The brothers are warned by a local cop, Lt. Green (Terrance Howard) to let the police do their job and keep clear of any trouble, which of course, Mark Wahlberg being Mark Wahlberg and a general badass, wholly ignores the advice and goes on the prowl to find the killers.

Mark Wahlberg's hairline has seen better days.

The brothers eventually find the guys responsible for their mother's death, and execute both of them, but not before finding out that there might be more than meets the eye with regards to the shooting. Angel finds out that Jeremiah was the sole beneficiary of their mother's $400,000 life insurance policy, and that his construction company has not been doing too well - things that Jeremiah has forgotten to inform his brothers about. It's up to Bobby, Angel and Jack to find out just what exactly went down the day their mother was shot, what the deal is with their brother Jeremiah, and why rumor has it that local crime boss Victor Sweet (Chiwetel Ejiofor) had something to do with Evelyn's murder.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Victor Sweet, the villian. Serious dude is serious.

The movie is essentially just what you'd expect from the basic premise of a revenge story. The mostly good cast does a decent job with their roles, although the only performance that really stands out is Chiwetel Ejiofor's turn as Victor Sweet. He was the highlight of every scene he was in, and had some genuinely hilarious moments, like when he forced one of his thugs the guy's poor wife to eat spaghetti off the floor. I'm sure the director was going for the dangerous and sadistic vibe for Sweet, but the scene was unintentionally funny, seeing the normally refined and well-spoken Ejiofor saying stuff like, "bitch, git yo ass up." The rest of the cast plods along, with Wahlberg trying to pull off dark and unstable as Bobby Mercer, but it's nothing to write home about.

Four Brothers holds up relatively well compared to most other revenge movies. The plot is intricate enough to keep the viewer guessing, and there is plenty of action to keep things interesting, including a cool chase scene on icy roads that ends in a lot of mayhem. Also, this being a Marky Mark movie, there is the obligatory fist fight in which some poor idiot gets his face bashed in. It's gritty, entertaining, and ultimately satisfying.

TL;DR - Decent revenge story with Mark Wahlberg acting like Mark Wahlberg and fighting dudes - 6/10

28 DAYS LATER (2002) - Fast zombies?!? Game over, man.

I apologize for the lack of posts recently, seeing as how I've been fairly busy with job interviews and the addictive drug that are Black Ops and CoH: Online. However, I have been watching a few good movies so I have a bit of a back log to make up for. Recently, I've been watching The Walking Dead on AMC and if you haven't seen it, give it a shot. It's a damn good show that's been picking up pace since the pilot episode and there's only a few episodes left before the season ends. Anyways, seeing all that zombie mayhem got me in the mood for some zombie post-apocalyptic horror, and I decided I'd give one of my personal favorites of the genre another watch.

28 Days Later is directed by Danny Boyle, of Sunshine and Slumdog Millionaire fame, and suffice to say, it's a bit different from most zombie movies. The flick kicks off with some animal liberation nutjobs breaking into a British medical laboratory and releasing monkeys infected with the highly contagious "Rage virus." Despite the frantic pleas of the scientist they capture, who warns them that a single drop of blood can infect anyone, the activists release the animals, and the chimps go batshit crazy and attack everyone. It turns out that Rage is a virus that turns anyone infected into, well... a raging maniac with a taste for murder and human flesh. And as opposed to the generic slow, clumsy zombies we're used to seeing in movies, the infected in Boyle's film are fast as Kenyan sprinters and absolutely tireless - jumping, climbing and avoiding obstacles.

London is empty. Cillian is all alone. Except not. There's zombies. Fast ones.

After the lab scene, the screen fades to black and we're presented with the words "28 days later," and see as Jim (Cillian Murphy), a former bicycle courier, lies completely naked on a hospital bed. He awakens and makes his way through the deserted hospital. As he stumbles outside, he realizes that London is completely devoid of people, leading to some very impressive shots of Jim in his hospital robe walking down an empty Westminster Bridge in amazement and horror. Jim quickly learns that he is in fact not alone. He is chased out of a church by a mob of deranged zombies intent on eating his face, when he is saved by two survivors, Mark and Selena (Naomie Harris).

The group takes shelter in an abandoned shop and Jim is told about the spreading of the virus, the chaos that followed and the evacuation and breakdown of the British government. Jim insists on visiting his parents to see if they are alive, and the other two survivors reluctantly agree. They arrive at the house the next day to see Jim's parents lying dead in their bed. Their forced to spend the night there, and in the middle of the night they're attacked by the infected. Mark is bitten and Selena kills him at once with a huge machete, knowing that he'd turn into one of the zombies near instantly. Selena and Jim eventually meet Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah, who are holed up in their apartment, and as a group decide to follow instructions Frank has heard on the radio announcing a survivor's center near Manchester.

The zombie apocalypse? I still needs my Cocoa Pebbles dawg.

28 Days Later has a relentless pace that never lets up, and Danny Boyle has a great talent for creating excruciating tension with his scenes. Walking into an abandoned gas station or going around a corner, you're constantly expecting something brutal to happen. Strangely enough, there's not a lot of gore compared to some other flicks of the genre, but the effect is the same and doesn't subtract from the horror aspect. The infected are genuinely badass - they're vicious, very fast, agile and have a habit of exploding out of the screen when you least expect them. The performances are generally good as well, with Cillian Murphy having a great starring role in his first major well known gig. He's believable and does a good job of portraying the fear and terror he goes through in the scenes.

It took me a while to finally watch this movie again, but I'm glad I finally did. Boyle's movie is an instant classic in the zombie genre, no doubt. It's a fresh take and one that is worthy of watching with some friends to maximize the scares and thrills. Very recommended.

TL;DR - Scarecrow from Batman Begins hides from zombies in England. Profit? - 8/10

PASSENGER 57 (1992) - "Always bet on black."

In the early 1990s, action movies were close to the pinnacle of perfection. They had everything a man movie needs: absurd plots, half-hour long gunfights, ultra-cool synth soundtracks, etc. There was one thing missing though. The decade that gave us Rambo, John McClane, every Arnold role, and all those generic Van Damme movies had few notable black dudes starring in their own action flicks. In stepped Wesley Snipes to save the day for Hollywood, and for a few years, he almost A-list material. Today, poor old Wesley might be locked up in prison for not paying taxes, but in 1992 he was legit. And it was this movie right here that kicked off an eventful career of ass-kicking, drop-kicking,  face-punching and tax evasion  - Passenger 57.

Only Wesley Snipes can rock this outfit. Don't even try it, man.

Passenger 57 starts off with Charles Rane (Bruce Payne), a master terrorist (is there any other kind?) about to get some plastic surgery to avoid capture by the FBI. Right before the surgeon makes the first cut, Rane realizes he's being set up by the feds and slices the good doc's throat with a scalpel and tries to make a run for it. I said try, because he ends up getting run over by a cop car and taken into custody.

While Rane's ass is sent to jail, we see ex-cop John Cutter (Snipes) working at an airline, teaching security lessons. After a rough day at the job, his executive big shot friend Sly Delvecchio (Tom Sizemore, before he started doing loads of coke)  offers him a job at his company, which Cutter eventually accepts. In the meantime, we see that the FBI, in all its infinite wisdom, has decided to transport Rane, the world's most dangerous man, aboard  a regular commercial flight, with only two cops to escort him. Terrorists: 1, Government Planners, 0.

Sitting next to a murderer is only slightly worse than sitting next to that kid that keeps kicking your seat.

Of course, it wouldn't be much of an action movie if Rane just killed both guards and flew off to Tahiti to drink tequila shots on the beach with supermodels for the rest off his life. No sir. By a stroke of luck, John Cutter happens to be on the very same flight.

Rane is such an evil, criminal mastermind of great skill that he has managed to put his own people aboard the plane. In a matter of minutes once the plane takes off, his guys kill both FBI agents and take over the plane. It's then up to Cutter to take back the plane and capture Rane, with only a stewardess to help him out. In the course of the movie, Cutter will jump out of a moving plane, punch a French guy in the throat, hit that French ponytail wearing bastard with a golf club in the balls, ride a motorcycle dangerously (why of course), beat up some redneck cops, and deliver some classic one-liners.

Tax problems already, Wesley?

I watched Passenger 57 with my dad as a kid, and at the time we thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Since I was about 8 or 9, anything rated R was just about as close to heaven on earth as it got. My dad and I watched the movie again this week for nostalgia's sake, and fun was had by all. The movie has aged pretty well, except for the soundtrack, which is just as cheesy and lame as it was back in the 90s. To be fair though, most movies from this decade suffer from the same thing, so it's not really that much of a drawback. Snipes does a believable job, and though he won't win any Oscars for his work, he's entertaining and he's easy to root for. Bruce Payne tries a bit too hard as the English-accented terrorist, and he isn't a particularly memorable villain.

Overall, not a bad movie - just what you'd expect from the typical 90s action/thriller mix. Good for a watch if you've never seen it, or if you have a massive, unexplained celebrity crush on Wesley Snipes and his questionable clothing choices during this decade.


TL;DR - It's like Die Hard. On an airplane. And the good guy is black. - 6/10

COMMANDO (1985) - Arnold at his glorious best

In the 1980s, Arnold Schwarzenegger was at the top of his game. His accent was nearly undecipherable, he killed at least 50 guys per movie, had the best one liners, and he probably ate steroids with every meal. Commando is probably the best movie ever made about a retired soldier who destroys a small Latin American country and kills a gay Australian villain in order to rescue his kidnapped daughter. In fact, I'm amazed that Out of Africa won Best Picture in 1985, since there's no way that borefest could have ever legitimately beat Arnold's magnum opus. Even the movie poster was badass. Just Arnold giving you a stone cold death stare. And the title is just one word: Commando - it assures you that the body count will be ridiculous.

Arnold showing his daughter how to feed dynamite to a deer.

Retired Special Forces soldier John Matrix (Arnold, obviously) lives in the mountains, far away from civilization. His daily routine consists of a healthy breakfast, followed by a few hours of deforestation, carrying tree trunks and a chainsaw back home, and later eating delicious sandwiches made by his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano). His idyllic life is interrupted when an Army helicopter carrying his former boss and two soldiers shows up. John is told that his old war buddies are being killed off, and no one knows who's doing it or why. The soldiers are stationed at the Matrix house to protect John and his girl, and the general flies off. In true guy movie fashion, there is no time wasted - as soon as the helicopter disappears over the hills, John smells the bad guys about to appear. They do, and they quickly shoot both soldiers dead and kidnap poor Jenny and make good their escape.

My daughter was kidnapped? BRB, shopping.

In one of the movie's most hilarious and over the top scenes, John pushes his sabotaged Chevy truck down mountain and chases after the villains, smashing through the forest with no brakes. Eventually, he crashes and is captured by the kidnappers, the leader of which is revealed to be a former protege of John's, a chain-mail vest wearing guy named Bennett (Vernon Wells). It turns out that Bennett and friends want John Matrix to overthrow some Latin American president in Val Verde (gotta love those fictional countries), and they make it abundantly clear he will never see his daughter again if he refuses. He'll have to escape from his captors and find a way to get her back before his time limit runs out.

Bennett wears a chain-mail vest. Hey, it's the 80s...

In the traditional sense, Commando is an average action movie. The dialogue is mostly stupid, the plot was thought up by 4th graders, and Arnold's acting is comparable to a tree rehearsing Hamlet. But it's so good as a celebration of the lost art of mindless action movies. The point of the movie is to see how much stuff Arnold can destroy and how many guys he can shoot in the film's 90 minute running time. I've compiled a short list of some of the crazy stuff Matrix does throughout the film:

• jumps off an airliner in mid take off and falls hundreds of feet through the air into a pond... and walks away
• throws a guy off a cliff
• rips out a car seat with his bare hands
• picks up a phone booth and throws it at some cops
• impales a bad guy on a steam pipe, and suggests he "let off some steam."
• throws saw blades at a dude's face
• shoots about 200 bullets from a single rifle without reloading

Many manly tears of joy were shed during this scene.

The bad dialogue is hilarious, and there's a gold mine of quotable scenes. The score is typical 80s action music, but I swear, you hear the Commando theme once, and you'll recognize it years later. Most of the humor in the movie is very tongue in cheek and no one seems to be taking themselves too serious. It's mindless, it's crude, and it's great. I love this movie.

TL;DR - Arnold destroys a small country and fights a gay Australian to get his kidnapped daughter back - 9/10

UNBREAKABLE (2000) - M. Night Shyamamalalalan takes on superheroes

Unbreakable was something of a rarity for me. I had never seen this movie before reviewing it tonight. The reason for the 10 year delay in watching Unbreakable is M. Night Shyamalan's latest series of terrible, eye-gouging-inducing movies. I couldn't bring myself to watch more crap movies with a gimmick twist ending, but a friend recommended this one, so I couldn't say no. Thankfully, this flick is one of his best (not that many to choose from, I know) and it was an interesting movie with a few decent, well-done twists. The fact that it's got Samuel L. Jackson already made it a million times better than the average movie. Sam Jackson could be in a laundry detergent commercial and that shit would be the best laundry detergent commercial you'd ever see.

Samuel L. Jackson's hair... on a good day.

Unbreakable begins with a black woman giving birth in a department store. A doctor comes to assist her since her baby won't stop screaming, obviously in pain. The doctor is astonished to find that the baby has suffered several fractures, much to everyone's surprise and horror. Flash forward a few years, and we see a young kid with his arm in a sling, refusing to go outside and play for fear of getting hurt. His mom gives him a comic book in order to get him out in the fresh air, on the condition that he cross the street to get it. Another jump in time, and it's revealed that the boy, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) has grown up into owning a fancy comic book art store and seems to hobble around. He explains that since childhood, he's been called "Mr. Glass" for the ease with which his bones are broken.

"And in the evening, I relax by lifting weights in excess of 300 pounds with no spotter."

The film then focuses on security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who is traveling by train and is involved in a massive accident when the trail is derailed. Everyone aboard the train is killed, except for David, who miraculously escapes without a single bruise. Elijah notices the news and gets in contact with David, asking him if he ever remembers being sick or injured. A confused David, who has pretty messed up relationship with his estranged wife, can't remember a single time he was hurt. While visiting Elijah's store with his son, David is told by Elijah that his survival in the train wasn't an accident, and implies that he might have superhuman abilities as told in comic books. David obviously has a hard time believing creep with funky hair and purple overcoat, but his son starts to think it's no coincidence. Over time, David also suspects that something is fishy about the whole situation, especially after he's able to bench press something like 500 pounds without breaking a sweat.

This is why you should spank your children.

The rest of the movie then covers Elijah's creeper attempts to get closer to David's family and David's realization that he might in fact be a superhero. Unbreakable is a pretty interesting story, and of course, being an M. Night Shyamalan movie, you know it's going to have some sort of kooky tweests and turns. The acting is mostly good, with Bruce Willis having a pretty subdued performance as the troubled family man, and Sam Jackson doing his usual good job with whatever the script wants from him. My main problem with this movie, and in fact, every Shyamalan movie, is the fact that everyone seems to whisper. WHISPERING all the time. It gets annoying. It doesn't add substance to the movie - it just gets tired after a while and irritated me to no end.

Overall, it's not a bad film by any stretch. It's got some memorable scenes, especially the parts in which David starts discovering his abilities, and it is surprisingly watchable despite the stupid whispered dialogue in some scenes and the moody lighting. Compared to the director's last craptastic movies, Unbreakable almost seems like his masterpiece. It's an above average thriller, with a good turn by Sam Jackson, and without giving any spoilers, I'll just say the ending was a bit of a letdown.

TL;DR - Bruce Willis might be a superhero but he doesn't know it and Samuel L. Jackson has funny hair - 6/10

Battle: Los Angeles trailer released

... and it looks straight up badass. Ever since we got a really short and vague teaser trailer a few months back, I'd been waiting to see the full length trailer for Battle: Los Angeles, which is coming next year. Check out the trailer. It basically looks like District 9, Black Hawk Down and Independence Day had an unholy child and bathed it in glorious 1080p Marines vs. aliens sci fi goodness.