Takers stars, left to right, Michael Ealy, Chris Brown, Idris Elba, Hayden Christensen and Paul Walker as an unflappable gang of thieves. (Screen Gems/Sony Pictures)

For Hollywood action movies, this has been the Summer of the Team. We've had The Losers, The A-Team and The Expendables, as well as the dream team of Inception.

Takers lures us in by promising a stylish, witty caper flick, then suddenly gets serious and actually starts developing its characters.

Last, but by no means least, comes Takers. For a picture opening on the final weekend of August – traditionally a dumping ground for inferior product – it’s surprisingly ambitious. It lures us in by promising a stylish, witty caper flick à la Oceans Eleven or The Italian Job, then suddenly gets serious and – OMG – starts developing its characters. Soon it becomes clear that director John Luessenhop is aiming to give us a smart crime drama in the manner of Michael Mann’s Heat. By the end, his reach has exceeded his grasp, but he gets full marks for trying.

The Takers themselves are ambitious dudes. They’re a super-sophisticated team of bank robbers who pull off huge, complex heists and live large on their takings (with 10 per cent donated to charity – seems they’ve got a Robin Hood streak). They dress sharp, drive top-of-the-line wheels and plot their grand thefts over champagne and single-malt scotch, either in their own posh nightclub or the penthouse aerie of their ringleader, Gordon Cozier (Idris Elba). Heck, Cozier even has a British accent – how classy is that?

The guys have just finished pulling off a daring daylight robbery of a Cal Fed bank in downtown L.A. – hijacking a TV news chopper to make their escape – when they’re handed a juicy new opportunity. Their old teammate Ghost (rapper T.I.), fresh from a stint in prison, rejoins them with a plan for an armoured-car heist that promises a haul big enough for them all to retire on. The catch: it has to be executed in a mere five days.

It’s the old one-last-job scenario, and the Takers, apparently unaware of the perils of that timeless Hollywood cliché, jump right in. They’ve also got another movie cliché, a tenacious cop, on their trail. Jack Welles (Matt Dillon, sounding like he smokes a pack of Marlboros for breakfast) is out to get them, at the expense of his crumbling personal life. Split from his wife, he has weekend custody of his young daughter (Isa Briones), but spends their precious quality time together in pursuit of Cozier.

The Takers have their own personal issues to deal with. Cozier’s older sister, Naomi (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), is a crack addict who checks herself out of rehab and back into his life just as he’s overseeing the armoured-car job. Then there’s the tension between Ghost and fellow crewmember Jake (Michael Ealy), who has just proposed marriage to Lilli (Zoe Saldana), Ghost’s former girlfriend.

Luessenhop, whose only previous feature was the 2000 prison drama Lockdown, sets himself a tricky task. He has to balance the demands of a convoluted caper plot with his noble efforts to craft a compelling character drama. The heist scheme itself, which involves blowing a hole in the middle of a traffic intersection, is pretty ludicrous. The movie doesn’t focus too closely on it and it’s just as well, since it doesn’t bear scrutiny. The characters get more of the director’s attention. Luessenhop manages to spotlight all six of the Takers, while giving equal time not only to the dogged Welles, but also to a tragic subplot involving Welles’s financially strapped partner (Jay Hernandez).

Zoe Saldana plays Lilli, one Taker's fiancee and another's ex-girlfriend. (Screen Gems/Sony Pictures)

However, the screenplay (by Luessenhop, Peter Allen, Gabriel Casseus and Avery Duff) doesn’t give us the expected Heat-like confrontation between Cozier and Welles. Too bad. Elba and Dillon may not be Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, but they’re both intense actors who could spark off each other. Instead, Cozier is reduced to trading pithy observations with the team’s bland sharpshooter (Paul Walker, from the Fast and the Furious franchise).

The most entertaining of the Takers, however, is T.I.’s swaggering Ghost – not least because he gets the lion’s share of the wisecracks. The cast's other recording artist, R&B singer Chris Brown, is short-changed in the dialogue department, but he’s compensated with a terrifically choreographed chase. As Jesse, Jake’s fleet-footed kid brother, Brown eludes the cops by leaping across moving car roofs like stepping-stones and barrelling through the busy corridors of an office building. Feverishly edited by Armen Minasian, the sequence is one long, wild adrenalin rush.

The other action scenes don’t measure up to it, but again Luessenhop shows ambition. He even takes a stab at some old-school lyrical violence with a shootout in a suite of the elegant Roosevelt Hotel – a slow-motion ballet of falling bodies and floating pillow feathers scored to sobbing violins. Peckinpah and Penn it ain’t, but at least he’s been studying the masters.

Unfortunately, he’s also studied every blessed action-movie trope. We get the Takers coolly walking away from an explosion – and later, walking toward us in slo-mo like Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Hayden Christensen, as the team’s jazz-piano-playing pretty boy, goes flying across the screen, both guns blazing. There’s even a classic Mexican standoff. After the merciless parodies of Hot Fuzz and The Other Guys, it’s impossible to watch this stuff with a straight face.

If Takers took less from other films of its ilk and relied more on its own considerable resources, it would stand a better chance of being the superior crime thriller it obviously aspires to be.

Takers opens Friday, Aug. 27.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.