'Take the 10' attempts more than your average low quality comedy does, but a lot of the humour falls flat.
It is certainly a comedy first and foremost, though sadly it has too much forced sex humour - the casting is also a bit of a mismatch. Josh Peck (Chris) and Tony Revolori (Chester) aren't anything atrocious at all, there's just a lack of sizeable chemistry which I think is needed for their roles. The rest of the cast aren't really that standout-ish, they are all rather plain - with the exception of director Chester Tam's Jay, who is alright.
I do respect the plot to this. It gets contrived quickly and isn't majorly interesting, but at least they tried to add a meaningful premise to the comedy as opposed to solely relying on the comedy itself like most do.
Not something I'd recommend all that highly, though there's certainly worse films from this genre out there.
Plot summary
A day in the life of two best friends, a drug dealer, and a store manager collide at a hip-hop concert in the Inland Empire.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
October 24, 2023 at 01:48 AM
Director
Top cast
Movie Reviews
A lot of the humour falls flat
Just an empty movie
This movie is really just a collection of random things happening over the course of 80 mins. It's not terrible but it is by no means worth your time.
Take the other road
I'm writing this review in the week that Netflix's stock surged by 10% as they beat market predictions, moving away from their 'rent-a- DVD' model to concentrate on original, quality content. Normally, this one would have slipped under my radar, but I saw it was picked up by distribution by Netflix and thought: let's give it a go.
I would describe this movie as being a sort of cross between Clerks and Superbad. It's a day in the life of two low-achieving shelf stackers at a Wholesome Foods (definitely not 'Whole Foods') store somewhere in the urban sprawl of LA. Their goal is to obtain tickets for a sold out concert, and they are not short on schemes to do so: be it ripping off a drug dealer, stealing cash from their boss, counter-ripping off a ticket forging older brother, and so on.
This movie's great strength - its random, weird, unpredictable nature - is also its greatest weakness. When watching any one scene, you have no idea what is going to happen. However, it also means the film struggles to find a consistent tone. Some characters (mostly the freeloading Chris) are very wacky and cartoonish. Others, like the conflicted Chester are more maudlin, and it doesn't work very well together. The movie's best and most consistent performance is without doubt the psychotic drug dealer Jay, played by Chester Tam, who was also the movie's writer and director. Every time he's on screen, he's like a force of nature. I was strangely reminded of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, if he was a 6'5" tattooed Korean.
Oddly, the moments that worked the best were the more dramatic ones. The comedy sort of fell flat in a lot of places, probably due to the aforementioned problem of the film not really having a clear idea of how many feet it wanted to keep in reality. A scene where two guys dodge incoming bullets driving down the freeway in a battered Corvette does not play well with a scene where the same two guys have a serious and frank discussion about where their friendship and lives are going.
In summary, Take The 10 will probably play well for the late-night comedy (read: 'stoner') crowd, but never guns any higher than that. Bonus points for a cameo role from Andy Samberg ('The Lonely Island') who proves he can make just about anything funny.