The Take started off well but ended terribly.A few things I noticed in the movie was that Felix should of came out of hospital in a wheelchair after BRAIN surgery, and no way in hell would he be allowed to drive a car or even be able to drive after being shot in the head.As others have said, the camera was all over the place. It gets tiresome and annoying having to put up wit that, even gave me a bit if a headache.So Felix gets shot in the head and wants revenge, goes after the bad guy and finally has him caught on top of a roof with a gun on him in the end and what does he do? NOTHING. The FBI guy turns up and its all over then, Felix is just 'dropped' off at home. LMAO. Right.What was the point of this movie?????

Drawing on clear influences from recent gritty, crime infused pieces such as 2000's Traffic and 2002's Narc, 2008 film The Take seems to have come and gone at a Canadian film festival before being banished to stores so as to increase profits on DVDs. It would seem there was nary a distributer at said Canadian festival willing to invest in Brad Furman's film; an overall shame, not a crying one but a shame none-the-less. The Take squeezes an amount of substance to do with male machismo; the tearing apart of a family unit; the sub-genre of the vigilante movie and the dealing of the aftermath of a heist plus all the crime drama conventions of mistrust between gangsters: honour amongst thieves, if you will, into 96 minutes. However, all too often these ideas jostle uncomfortably with one another – a persistent vying for power, a struggle between genres and sub-genres; content and study. This renders The Take less interesting than it might have been, but good enough to see in order to observe a moderately interesting, well acted independent American drama.I think the film thinks it's more powerful and more affecting than it is in actualité. The tale is of a righteous man wronged, and the subsequent fall out it has on both his life and the lives of those around him. But for all the substance, for all the promise and for all the content; to have The Take boil down to a chase sequence on foot that, again, certainly thinks it has more of a sense of drama involved than it actually does, was just a mite disappointing and anti-climatic. Furman likes his visual tricks and gimmicks, with someone somewhere failing to realise that spectacle and visualness ought to have been secondary to this screenplay's agenda as gritty, Hispanic-American living conditions; seams in a family becoming unravelled; a man loosing his mind and sense of masculinity plus brutal shootings during a heist sequence were the order of the day. Furman tells the story with every trick in the book: the visual flair ingredient to the editing and camera work; the speeding up of footage; transitions and the hand-held camera technique on top of a number of scenes set in rooms that are close to all being entirely blacked out for sake of mood.John Leguizamo plays the role of Felix De La Pena, a man of Hispanic descent living with his wife Marina (Perez) and their two kids in Los Angeles. De La Pena is a nice, upstanding man with a great deal of fondness for his family and the work he does. His large friend-base plus the fact his job sees him adopt a certain role of honour and trust in driving an armoured truck instills a sense of responsibility on top of the other positive conventions. But one day, things go spectacularly wrong when Tyrese Gibson's criminal Adell holds up the truck; has De La Pena drive it back to the HQ before robbing the place of its money and fatally wounding De La Pena. We've seen people shot following heists in films many-a time before, usually hard-bodied; no nonsense criminals in hard boiled neo-noirs, but they'd always get back up again after a brief lay off and plough on ahead, seeking money and revenge. The Take's sequence of wounding feels grainer than usual, De La Pena's pained reaction to his injuries are stark and cutting in ways that I've rarely felt a gunshot wound in a film before. The injury feels more painful than usual because of the film's delicate buildup of the victim: a well mannered; rather slim, though not necessarily 'weak', and supremely upstanding character in De La Pena. From here, a process of recovery for both the mind, body and soul begins as FBI agent Steve Perelli (Cannavale) hunts the wrong-doers.It's here the film beds down for a long stretch of content similar to one another. De La Pena's sense of self vanishes and he gets a lot angrier a lot more often than usual, with Leguizamo really rather brilliantly portraying this new character: this fresher, more frothing at the mouth person. He installs security equipment in a fit of paranoia and undergoes a process of long recovery that sees him sense a once-present notion of 'manliness' now gone. Subsequently, he cannot make love to his wife; gets agitated as a result and seems to maintain this odd sense of being unable to really 'feel', as if to cry or get upset at the shooting is to fatally expel a sense of male machismo, with an ideology that might read something like: 'men don't cry - men get over this sort of thing'.I wrote a while ago in an observation on a Finnish film from 2006 entitled Lights in the Dusk about the film's over-emphasising on the 'little-guy' in a big situation. In said film, a hapless turnkey is rendered fall guy so a gang of thieves can swipe some diamonds his job it is to contain. I cited 2001's sprawling and maddening heist flick 3000 Miles to Graceland, in which during a heist sequence at a casino, countless numbers of body guards and members of law enforcement are dispatched like the many nameless, faceless bad guys that pop up at you in certain video games, each one of them as fatally injured as the next. The Take, like said Finnish film, rejects the generic notion to follow those perpetrating the heist and instead opts for an unbeaten route down into the gloomy undergrowth of a victim of the shooting recovering. Needless to say, a lot of people that were shot in 3000 Miles to Graceland would've gone through what De La Pena goes through here – it's when these sorts of films dry up that we know we're in trouble. I notice that at the present time, The Take has a lower IMDb rating than 3000 Miles to Graceland: good grief!

John Leguizamo is an earnest security guard in Los Angeles who loves his wife, Rosie Perez, and his two children. He is coerced into taking part in a robbery of an armored car by three husky guys led by Tyrese Gibson, who threatens his family if he doesn't comply. A couple of other guards are caught by surprise and deliberately murdered by the thieves. Gibson shoots Leguizamo in the head and arranges the crime scene in such a way as to make him look guilty.Leguizamo manages to survive. He's comatose for a while but eventually recovers, as much as you can recover from a bullet wound in the frontal lobe. "His personality may be changed," the surgeon warns his wife.Indeed it does change. Frontal lobotomies were discovered by means of accidents. They tended to cut down on the more virulent hallucinations but they also made patients' manners coarser and impaired their ability to plan for the future. That is, these kinds of wounds, whether medically induced or otherwise, kneecap your judgment.Leguizamo is thrown into easy rages over trivial things. He can't satisfy his wife anymore and smashes furniture, driving his family away. He sasses the cops and the cynical FBI agent coolly rendered by Bobby Cannavale. Then he undertakes to find the criminals on his own, skipping out from under surveillance. There are only a few chases and shootings.It's a taut and credible story and the performances are good. Leguizamo doesn't exemplify celluloid magic, and Gibson, as the chief malefactor, isn't given the kind of non-stereotypical license that, say, Delroy Lindo is, in some of Quentin Tarantino's work. But Cannavale is just fine and Rosie Perez does as well here as she's done anywhere else. Her features are more lined, her dimples deeper, and she's not twenty years old anymore but who is? The movie's virtues are almost destroyed by the direction, photography, and editing. They are to the film's integrity what that bullet was to Leguizamo's brain.It's not as bad as the last two "Bourne" movies -- but it's pretty bad. The camera wobbles all over the place. There are instantaneous cuts, some negative shots. I don't have the technical vocabulary to describe the photography but it's high contrast. There were times when I thought the images would lapse into nothing more than blinding light sources and reflections, leaving the remainder of the screen entirely black. A scene in the OR is shot with the lighting mostly coming from the side, so that the gaping wound in which the doc's forceps are probing is a deep, dark void. And this is an operating room! The pallet seems to vary from white and black to gloomy green.Sometimes this sort of thing, done in moderation, works splendidly, as in "Seven." Other cop/crime stories of unimpeachable quality haven't used this faddish stuff at all -- "L. A. Confidential," "To Live and Die in L. A.", not to mention "Chinatown." I mean, really, there is a simple extended close up of a cell phone -- and the camera oscillates from side to side like the head of a snake in a fairy tale.Well, I guess we don't want to bore the fourteen-year-old minds in the audience, who would be snoring if five minutes passed without some kind of action -- if not the characters, then the camera. Still, it's bad enough in mindless action movies but this story deals as much with the drama of Leguizamo and his family as it does with the unfolding of the crime plot.

This is one of the lowest-rated action films, that i found to be highly entertaining, and a gem in my eyes. Its the story of an armored truck driver, who is wounded in a heist, and battles rehabiliation and trying to track down the person who committed the crime. Leguizamo shines in the lead, while Tyrese, although not entirely convincing, does better than his previous work in Baby Boy and 2 fast 2 furious...Meanwhile, Bobby Cannavale was very good here. I thought the music was well incorporated, and Lukas Ettlin did a good job with the cinematography, and the editing was also good. THis is one of the better Hollywood low budget b-movie esquire films i have seen. It may not be Oscar-worthy, but as far as a high- paced action flick, i thought it got the job done better than a lot of films with 3 or 4 times the budget, i would almost forget at times that the films estimated budget was less than a million. --IMDB Rating: 5.2. MY Rating: 9/10