The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

It’s as if the makers of Takers
saw Andy Samberg’s spoof song ‘Cool Guys Don’t Look at
Explosions’ and thought it was real. Takers
paints a glamorous and slick picture of the gangster lifestyle without any
hint of sense of irony or shame; bringing together an ensemble of good-looking actors
and billing them as a cool breed of criminals that spend as much time picking
out their outfits as they do planning their next heist. They stack the money that they
rob next to a pile of Details issues,
and then use the cash to support their faux-rat-pack lifestyle.

There is a plot that is almost decent enough to hold the film together.
It revolves around a mean and lean crew of bank robbers led by the determined
Gordon (Elba). They have been successfully robbing banks for a long time; long
enough to attract the attention of detective Jack Welles (Dillon), who has managed
to identify each member except for Ghost (T.I), the wild-card bandit that just got
out of jail.

Ghost pitches the crew a new heist, which promises to be their biggest
yet. The prospect of huge amounts of cash tempts even the most honest of the robbers; so as the plan unfolds, members turn against
each other, and in turn, they compromise their
operation, giving detective Jack the opportunity to track them down before reaping their rewards.

Aside from giving them swinging bravado, Takers attempts to add a little substance to the characters through
touching subplots involving their personal relationships and troubled family
members. However, these forced efforts at humanising the characters largely
ring false and act as a needless distraction from the thrills.

When it comes to what really matters, though; Takers gets it right by keeping a lively pace of gunfire sequences, and although these action set
pieces lack ingenuity; they are exciting, swift and frequent.

Takers might act like
it’s the coolest kid in school, but the film’s insistence on being cool is more
suspicious than reassuring. No film would be that desperate for attention and
constantly reminding us of how smooth it is if it didn’t have something to
hide, or to compensate for.