Mark Reviews Movies: TAKE THE NIGHT

Take the Night, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 7, 2022

Take the Night, from writer/director/star Seth McTigue, is all setup with very little payoff. That the premise, the story's characters, and the movie's visual style show such strength of promise keeps McTigue's debut feature from only being a wasted opportunity. In general, though, the movie is one.

The grim, dim, and moody look (with the assistance of cinematographer Rainer Lipski) is apparent and effective from the start. It's a stylish flash-forward—all momentum, from a bag being carried, to criminals organizing and driving, and to the targeted victim heading toward his unknown fate—to the plot's key event. That scene has a group of young men abducting Robert Chang (Sam Song Li), the equally young CEO of a major import company, from a parking garage.

Going back a few days, we briefly meet those kidnappers. Their leader is Chad (McTigue), a military veteran with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, who lives with his younger brother Todd (Brennan Keel Cook), who wants to join the military for some sense of purpose to his aimless life—despite his brother's warnings.

The CEO has a brother, too, by the way. He's William (Roy Huang), an elder sibling overlooked by his father in taking over the family business, and a scene that intercuts between the two pairs of brothers—one set impoverished, the other well-to-do, both couples with a lot of familial tension and resentment between them—debating over breakfast hints at the character study McTigue clearly has in mind, before the wheels of the lightweight plot speed the narrative past that potential.

Two other major characters, the criminal brothers' friends, figure into this plot. One is Shannon (Shomari Love), who was once a promising college basketball player whose career ended due to an injury (All of that back story seems to exist only to set up a momentary instance of suspense, when Shannon's bad knee slows him down during a getaway). The other is Justin (Antonio Aaron), who served with Chad and whose psychological tics of folding gum wrappers and being silent don't even register as the results of trauma until the leader stands up to his cohorts mocking the guy.

On the periphery, there's Melissa (Grace Serrano), Robert's seemingly loyal and secretive assistant, who longs to re-unite with a sick son, currently living in Mexico, and has so much early attention that her disappearance from the story is probably a giveaway of something. Since McTigue's screenplay is so hasty in both establishing and subsequently ignoring the lives and concerns of these characters, though, there's little reason to remember how vital she appears at the beginning.

The point is that there is potential in these characters and the assorted issues that have brought them to this point—connections of familial trouble that transcend class, of emotional and physical pain that have left them stagnant, and of some desire of each one to prove something to himself and each other that lead them to extremes. It all starts relatively innocently, when William hires Chad and his pals to pull off a mock kidnapping—a joke so cruel that there's probably something beneath it—of his brother for his birthday.

William doesn't know that Chad has an ulterior motive in mind. He wants to rob Robert while they have the wealthy man from a rich family tied up anyway. At that point, the characters simply become pawns in the mechanics of a scheme that goes according to plan, until it doesn't. That leads to a series of foot pursuits and a car chase.

While McTigue certainly keeps things moving—against the backdrop of darkened office spaces, a haunting scene of be-robed figures on a rooftop, the nighttime glare of city streets rushing by, and a standoff at a gloomy dock—in this plot, it is simply plot motion for its own sake. The characters, performed with quiet resolve and some sympathetic melancholy by the cast, and the various ideas, about class and family and friendship and being bypassed by the world, are sidelined, never to really take the focus again (There is, at least, some heartfelt resolution for Robert and William, while the struggling criminals are too caught up in an ongoing manhunt and a last-minute betrayal to exist outside the plot anymore).

With Take the Night, McTigue shows himself to be a filmmaker with a solid sense of momentum and atmosphere. His uncertain and incomplete storytelling is this movie's downfall.

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