Take Down (Defiant Films – 2016) Review

Don’t you just love when teenagers clearly aren’t played by teenagers or at least give or take a few years? Sure, many can get away with it, but when you throw together a cast that can’t seem to hide their aging looks, you wonder why this continues to become the norm in film and television.

With thrills, action, drama and a little bit of romance, Take Down has its fair share of familiar faces in its cast including Phoebe Tonkin (The Originals), Dominic Sherwood (Shadowhunters), Jeremy Sumpter (Peter Pan), Elliot Knight (Once Upon a Time) and Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl). As mentioned earlier, none of these actors or actresses were teenagers when the film was made. It’s no question that these faces upped the status of the film. Although they aren’t necessarily known to all – and I doubt everyone will recognize them – they’re not fresh out of acting school and that has to count for something.

The cast played their roles respectively but didn’t really have any challenging or award winning performance moments. That’s not exactly their fault though, that falls more to the writers. An actor can typically only work with what they’re given.

On the other side of the cast, we have the parents and the baddies. Team parents spent most of their time debating questions around the likes of ‘do I save my son or go bankrupt?’. All the drama, all the dilemmas. Who knows how it’ll go down. You’ll just have to watch to find out.

Like a video game, the combat fell into sections where, over time, each baddie had to be taken down and each one got harder to do so, all leading to the final boss battle. This narrative intertwining with combat works practically, but it unfortunately leads you down a very predictable path.

In spite of all this, I was able to sit through the film and that has to be a good thing. Perhaps with a do over and an edit of the script, Take Down could become an interesting film. But alas, we as an audience are given what we’re given and Take Down just doesn’t have much to give.