Every once in a while, my practice of looking through all the new releases
can
produce some unexpected pleasures. I had no special expectations for The
Take, but this low budget indie turned out to be an good crime drama which
held my interest from start to finish.
John Leguizamo plays a family man who is a straight-arrow guard for an
armored car company. One Friday there is an is ambush and the guard is shown
proof that the robber's accomplices are holding his family hostage, just in
case there are any lapses in his co-operation. He dutifully executes his
normal daily run, and helps the baddies unload the truck full of cash, but the
robber turns out to be a homicidal maniac who blows away everyone at the
armored car HQ, including Leguizamo.
Short movie?
No, not quite. The guard lives, despite a bullet in his brain. That's the
good news. The bad news is that he has been framed for the
crime. A sharp FBI agent (Bobby Cannavale) smells something fishy, and does
not arrest the guard, but he decides to keep a close eye on him because he
seems to be keeping secrets. The guard IS keeping secrets, in a sense, but
they are also secrets from himself. The bullet in his brain impaired several
of his normal brain functions, including short-term memory and reasoning
skills. As the investigation begins, the guard is not really capable of
understanding exactly what happened, or that a dangerous psychopath still
lurks in the shadows, waiting for a chance to remove a witness who has seen
his face.
The other key brain function which the guard can't gain control of is his
temper, so he's not pleasant to be around, and his wife ends up leaving him.
In danger of losing his family permanently, being killed by a sociopath,
and/or and ending up in prison for a crime he doesn't think he committed, the
guard must somehow try to piece together enough dribs and drabs of memory to
convince the FBI that he's an honest man and is probably in danger himself.
The premise is difficult to accept. There's the overworked memory loss
gimmick plus the ol' "accused man solving the crime on his own to prove his
own innocence" cliché, so the film requires a great deal of "suspension of
disbelief." Despite those liabilities, this film is quite satisfying,
absorbing, and three-dimensional, so much so that I completely forgot that it
had some problems to begin with. The director did a helluva job for his first
feature-length drama, and showed how a well-crafted film with some good actors
can deliver a lot of bang for a small buck. Scene after scene crackles with
tension, and the three main performances (Rosie Perez, John Leguizamo and
Bobby Cannavale) are absolutely natural and spot-on, which really helps to
make the contrived premise seem credible. Rosie Perez has talked about how
difficult it was to do the graphic sex scene with her platonic friend John
Leguizamo, but the two of them seemed to deliver the scene with just the right
edge.
Since the film functions both as a psychodrama and a police procedural, and
since the guard is faced with constant threats from so many directions, there
is no possibility to lose interest. Once we are put inside the guard's
situation, we will see it through with him, particularly since we know even
more about his innocence than he himself knows. He gets ornery and crazy from
time to time, and even beats his beloved wife when he gets a particularly
painful headache, but we don't turn against him or start to dislike him
because our identification with him and his situation is so complete that we
accept it as valid character development. He's a complex character forced by
his situation into certain forms of unacceptable behavior.
