Critics Can Take or Leave Takers

The makers of Takers borrowed a lot of good bits from other movies in making their heist thriller, with fairly satisfying but not stellar results, say critics.

• The story of an upscale gang of Los Angeles thieves is "a buffet of Gritty Crime Drama clichés that offers no surprises but nothing egregiously stupid, either," writes Eric Snider at Cinematical.

• Takers is "surprisingly OK," decides Liam Lacey at the Globe & Mail. "Once you get past the recycled quality of the characters and dialogue, the movie has some stylish action sequences and moderately clever plot turns" that rival anything in the higher-profile summer thrillers, he writes.
• The action seems to play second fiddle to the cast—including Hayden Christensen, Chris Brown, and rapper TI Harris—which just lounges around looking glamorous, complains Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. The movie, he writes, "feels suspiciously like a feature-length commercial for expensive liquor."
• Matt Dillon, who plays a cop obsessed with tracking the gang down, "gives it a shot of low-key, no-nonsense professionalism," writes AO Scott at the New York Times. As for the rest, "there is plenty of nonsense, a great deal of stylish posturing and clothes-horsing, and a few action sequences that manage to be both gripping and preposterous."

(More Matt Dillon stories.)