Take

Take" is called a thriller in its press notes, but it's really one of those tragedy-under-a-microscope slogs that assumes a surfeit of storytelling angles makes a harrowing incident automatically more interesting.
Writer-director Charles Oliver's parallel-tracks narrative gives us Ana (Minnie Driver), an economically straitjacketed wife and mother trying to do the best for her developmentally challenged son, and Saul (Jeremy Renner), a lowlife with lethal debt problems who grows increasingly desperate about his situation.
Guessing how these lives tragically intersect isn't terribly hard -- present-day scenes show us Saul on death row and Ana driving to witness his execution -- but it gives the movie an exploitatively creepy dramatic pall in which we're just waiting around for the voyeurism of a shattering moment of violence and someone's subsequent grief. Which is a shame, since both Driver and Renner are talented actors who can invest their individual scenes before that fateful meeting with a kind of everyday sympathy for downtroddenness. Oliver also has an admirable pictorial eye for widescreen compositions that suggest empty spaces resting uncomfortably next to people who have few options in filling the holes in their lives. But in the end, "Take" is too enamored of its time-shifting gimmick and cheap suspense to ultimately have much impact.
Da The Los Angeles Times, 25 luglio 2008