“Takers” (Action: 1 hour, 47 minutes); Starring: Matt Dillon, Idris Elba, Hayden Christensen, Paul Walker and Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris; Director: John Luessenhop; Rated: PG-13 (Profanity, violence, sensuality and brief nudity)

Movie Review: A team of five charismatic guys are successful professional bank robbers. The heists are well planned and very profitable. After the return of Ghost (Harris), one of the gang’s ex-incarcerated members, the team decides to do one more heist. They plan to take approximately $20 million from an armored car. However, with only a week’s worth of planning, the group finds even the best-conceived plans occasionally require an even better escape plan.     

The heist presented at the film’s onset is a brilliant introduction to a team of interesting guys. Yet audiences receive little time to evaluate and appreciate these people. This film spends most moments with action sequences, which are more sensibly real than most action films until the last 25 minutes, when the film becomes one continuous gunfest. Bullets fly like swarms of gnats at a swamp. Meanwhile, the plot is predictable as tonight’s forecast — dark!

A certain familiarity exists with “Takers,” a feeling one has seen it before and recently. In its own haphazard manner, “Takers” is very similar to last year’s “Armored” (Director Nimrod Antal) which also starred Dillon with a bad temper.

This seeming déjà vu is a result of casting actors in roles similar to ones they played in earlier productions. In his teens, Dillon often portrayed troubled teens. As an adult actor, he now plays mostly troubled law-enforcement officials and sometimes troubled criminals. Either way, he plays someone with a bad temper frequently. Here, he plays another troubled law-enforcement official, a role similar to his character in “Crash.” Still, Dillon is the film’s best actor, only Elba registers otherwise. The entire cast remains ineffective, as they are not moving. While their antics are entertaining and never boring, they fail to make you care about them or their actions.

Attempts to make these characters tangible as humans you can care for is desperately lacking. People live and die in this Western-like action piece, but none inspire an emotional response worth remembering.

Grade: C (Take a

number … )

“The Last Exorcism” (Horror: 1 hour, 27 minutes); Starring: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Caleb Landry Jones and Louis Herthum; Director: Daniel Stamm; Rated: PG-13 (Disturbing imagery, gore, strong language, violence, sexual innuendo and thematic material)

Movie Review: Cotton Marcus (Fabian) is a well-known evangelist preacher in Baton Rouge, La. He has been a preacher since childhood, but he has an epiphany one day. The belief religions can be evil in their own accords and hurt people in the name of higher, unknown beings.

To prove no such thing as demon possessions exist, Cotton Marcus and his team of three travel to the nearby Sweetzer Farm in Ivanwood to document their findings. There, Marcus investigates the potential demon possession of Nell Sweetzer (Bell), a young, unworldly teen home-schooled in rural Louisiana. Marcus may not believe in the Satan, but Satan and his demons believe in Rev. Marcus.

With hope, the title is accurate, and this is the last exorcism audiences will see for some time by novice filmmakers. The worst part about this film is that it is all over the place, as if screenplay writers were adjusting the story per scene as filming commenced. Viewers receive three plots, individually they are intriguing; together, they are more confusing than quantum physics.

All is entertaining, but much of what happens via this story occurs as part of some unknown back-story. Even more, this movie uses first-person filming, where a character in the film is the cinematographer. The problem is that at some point, the person would put down the camera, especially when that person’s life is in danger. Films such as these should move to third-person cinematography at some moment, where conventional cinematography could show a more realistic venture, including capturing the character who is the camera operator eventually.        

Grade: C- (With hope, ‘last’ means no additional renditions)