Clearly written by several people (four to be exact) and occasionally feeling like it was edited by an entire class of them, Takers is an above-average heist thriller that's undone by poor screenwriting and worse post-production. Every once in awhile, it's easy to tell that a movie simply had too many cooks in the kitchen and not enough cohesive vision. You know those films where major characters disappear for an hour? Or where the heist in question doesn't really make sense? Or where the ending feels tacked on? If you don't, look no further than Takers. The sad thing is that one can also easily see the potential high-polish action film buried underneath all the rubble. There are a few action set-pieces and reasonably interesting characters that it's tempting to think that either the film needed just a little more work in rewrites or, more likely, a little less work in editing. I wouldn't be stunned if there isn't a much-stronger director's cut of Takers somewhere down the road where the characters are given the depth they're missing here, but this version just doesn't work.

One of the biggest problems with Takers is a lack of a compelling lead. We're introduced to the main crew of this heist film with an opening bank robbery and dialogue so ridiculously on-the-nose as "We take, gents. That's what we do. We're takers." The posse is headed by the charismatic 'G' (Idris Elba) – you need no further sign that the film was rewritten a few times than the fact that the film's lead has a different name in the credits on the press site than he does in the production notes ... on the same press site and that I think both of them are wrong. 'G' has a sister named Naomi (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who we meet just as she's about to get out of rehab and might

Daniel Stamm's The Last Exorcism is not what you think it is from the previews. Lionsgate has pushed the horror elements of the film along with Eli Roth's name to try and bring in viewers on opening weekend who are looking for a Saw-esque thrill ride. The actual film is much more subdued, intellectual, and clever than gore junkies will be expecting. In fact, it's very low on

Rob Reiner's Flipped is an odd hybrid of genuinely sentimental dramedy with broad period recreations that almost feel torn from a parody of the genre. The film is based around the memories of the incredibly formative years in which every minor action has major resonance and it features enough honest heart and includes very strong central performances but also feels like it could have been a bit more

Mesrine: Killer Instinct is the first half of a pair of crime epics (wildly successful in their home country of France and followed by Public Enemy #1, which we'll review next week) about the legendary Jacques Mesrine, a notorious criminal in the 1960s and 1970s who was reportedly responsible for dozens of murders, bank robberies, and other dangerous activities. The two films have thematic commonalities with Michael Mann's

When James Cameron said that he thinks every movie should be in 3D, I don't think he was envisioning two killer prehistoric piranhas fighting over a man's severed penis only to then have it burped back up and "into the audience" via the wonderful new technology. Such is one of only many "joys" (others include a controversial horror director's head being lopped off by a motorboat, a cheesy

In the vein of so many popular culture parodies before it, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's Vampires Suck both satirizes and at the same time pays homage to a phenomenon sweeping through America's schools: Stephanie Meyer's infamous Twilight series. Using the same basic plot structure as the first installment of the Twilight series, the tongue and cheek Vampires Suck takes aim at the themes and moral implications of

Erik White's Lottery Ticket is so generally-but-not-notably bad that it's hard to even muster the critical stamina to appraise it. It's one of those movies that is rarely so unbearable that it demands that a critic warns his loyal readers away from going anywhere near it but it also contains so few positive attributes that there's very little nice to say about this semi-comedy. It falls into that

If one were to teach a class on screenwriting pitfalls, a section of the syllabus would clearly have to be dedicated to the disasters that befall projects with unlikable characters. Screenwriters need to be aware of the problems that come with writing characters that the audience can sense even the director and actors involved don't really like. One of the sessions could feature a dissection of the truly

Bruce Beresford's Mao's Last Dancer is a well-intentioned slice of melodrama but all the good intentions in the world can't hide the film's many, many flaws. This is the kind of drama that critics used to compare to made-for-TV movies but the sad fact is that most HBO and even basic cable telefilms have surpassed the surface-level clichés and cheap production values of Mao's Last Dancer. In other

Patricia Clarkson gives one of the strongest and most fascinating performances of the year in the memorable Cairo Time, a film that transcends being a mere travelogue to linger in the mind as a study of a very unusual chapter in a woman's life. With jaw-dropping cinematography that will make you see this international hub in a way you've never seen it before, Cairo Time is a subtle,