Takers

TAKERS Directed by John Luessenhop. Starring Hayden Christensen, Matt Dillon, Paul Walker, Idris Elba, Jay Hernandez, Michael Ealy, Zoe Saldana, Tip Harris, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Chris Brown 12A cert, gen release, 107 min

A WEEK AGO, we enjoyed a film that seemed happy to generate comparisons with Michael Mann's Heat. When set beside this nonsense, however, Ben Affleck's The Townseems like the most distant of cousins to the respected Mann picture.

Revisiting Heat's near fetishistic obsession with LA geography, again featuring a tired cop and a gang of ruthlessly professional robbers, Takersplays like Michael Mann reimagined by Jive Bunny. If James Last got his hands on Heat it might look like this. It's Mann played by Bontempi organ. We could go on.

The creators of Takerswould, no doubt, be appalled to see all those references to terminally naff music. This film, you see, believes itself to be very cool indeed. Following an opening heist, we join the gang at a brown bar where they smoke cigars, swill brandy in huge snifters, run fingers along stockinged legs and generally behave like teenagers improvising Hugh Hefner. One of the guys (the one brought to woody half-life by Hayden Christensen) wears a stupid little hat and practices a line in hip argot that felt old in the Iron Age.

The whole business is totally absurd and made more so by the script’s efforts to introduce some sort of moral framework. “Ten per cent to the usual charities?” one Taker says as they tidy up the accounting on their latest bank job. When set beside these guys, detective Matt Dillon seems like, well, a member of the human race.

To be fair, the action sequences are carried off with a bearable degree of competence. If something blows up, you can be certain that the camera will be pointing at it during, before and after detonation. There’s a fair turn from The Wire’s Idris Elba and, as his character’s sister, an unexpected one from Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Unfortunately, all small mercies are ultimately overpowered by the avalanche of sub-Vegas vulgarity. They think they’re cool? You’re cooler than they are. Yes, you in the argyle cardigan.