'Takers' take all right, but give nothing in return

"Takers" ranks as one of the most pretentious, ill-conceived and badly botched heist movies ever made.

"We're takers!" shouts Gordon Jennings (Idris Elba), leader of a band of efficient and elusive L.A. bank robbers. "We take!"

They sure do.

They take the famous armored car robbery plot from "The Italian Job." They take the messy hotel room shootout from "True Romance." They take the final scene from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (plus the line "Who are those guys?"). They take the street gunfights from "Heat."

They take and take and take!

And what do they give us in return?

A dour, soulless action movie riddled with dopey, expository dialogue, dislikable characters, horribly misplaced music (a sad cello playing during a violent shootout?) and a hyper editing style so cranked up and blurry that you can't tell what's going on in most of the action sequences.

This last criticism is particularly annoying when bank robber Jesse Attica (Chris Brown) leads cop Jack Welles (Matt Damon) on a dynamic street chase through L.A. and escapes by performing some of the best and boldest parkour moves since the French thriller "District B-13."

But the sequence has been shot so tight and edited so quick that we never really see how magnificent these stunts are. "Takers" actually undermines its own quality.

Jesse and Gordon belong to an elite band of robbers made up of A.J. (erstwhile Darth Vader Hayden Christensen), John (Paul Walker), Jake (Michael Ealy) and others.

When one of their own, Ghost (T.I. Harris), gets sprung from prison, he talks the gang into improvising a quick armored car job in five days.

"It's too fast!" Jake shouts. "It's too rushed! This isn't how we do things!"

Well, Jake, it's how you do things now, because the four inept writers on "Takers" want it that way.

Meanwhile, Jack, a scruffy plainclothes cop and his partner Eddie Hatcher (Jay Hernandez) get on the outlaws' trail after they execute a daring bank robbery.

(A disclosure: I didn't get the full effect of the robbery, or understand the armored car heist plans outlined by Ghost because of a 34-minute disturbance at Chicago's ICON Theater involving patrons loudly protesting they couldn't find seats. I thought I would be really mad I missed so much of the film. Later, I realized they were more engaging than the characters on the screen.)

"Takers" is directed by John Luessenhop, who's more interested in macho men posing in group shots - think men bonding during a beer commercial - than fleshing out individual characters for dramatic enhancement.

These guys aren't people, they're merely types tagged with superficial relationships intended to give them depth.

Jack gets an ignored little daughter. Gordon gets a junkie sister. Jake gets an ex-girlfriend.

And we get a movie with hard-hitting dialogue such as "We're takers!"

We're the taken.

"Takers"

@x BTO factbox text bold with rule:Starring: Matt Dillon, Idris Elba, Paul Walker, Hayden Christensen

Directed by: John Luessenhop

Other: A Screen Gems release. Rated PG-13 for language, nudity, sexual situations, violence. 107 minutes