Heislegend

As it stands right now, all of the reviews from this movie are 1 star or 8-10 stars. All of these people are wrong.

For starters, this movie plays out exactly like a fist person shooter video game. The tropes, the dialog, and obviously the camera angle and movement. There's little doubt what this movie is supposed to be and, in all honesty, it does it rather well. The whole first person thing has been tried to a much more limited extent in some movies. House Of The Dead and Doom come to mind. But in these movies it was more for the movie's denouement...a final showdown. In Hotel Inferno it's done throughout and it's kind of enjoyable.

This isn't without it's drawbacks. The camera is jumpy, the dialog is on-par with a video game, and it lacks a bit of continuity. You'll find a 10 minute action sequence ended just to have some exposition on what happened and what will happen next. Again, exactly as you would in a video game. It's like finishing a mission and waiting for a cut scene to tell you what you did and what to do next, except it's a movie. This gets a bit old even if you follow the premise.

For a movie with this budget the special effects are actually quite well done. Gore fans will undoubtedly appreciate the over-the-top violence and gore and others will probably just laugh at the preposterousness of it all. Either way, the special effects team absolutely did the most with what they had.

All in all it's a relatively enjoyable movie if you know what you're in for (and have a six pack of your preferred adult beverage available). It's something a little new but absolutely not without it's flaws. Is it perfect? No. Is it a bit of fun to watch with some friends? Absolutely.

A lot of people on IMDb like to throw out hyperbole like "worst film I've ever seen". I've said it before, but if you can point to just one movie as the worst, you're clearly not watching enough crap. So what does that mean for The Taking? Well, it's not the worst, but it's probably in my top 20.

You're no doubt asking yourself "Can it really be that bad?" and surprised that you're concerned what a stranger on the internet thinks. It's not the wooden and unpleasant acting that does it. It's not the painfully bad "special effects". It isn't the complete lack of any comprehensible story. It's not the fact that the movie tries to come off as surreal by using horribly juxtaposed images and grating sound in an attempt to create a tense atmosphere. These things are all certainly true, but it's the way the movie combines these aspects into such a colossal pile of failure that almost has to be seen to be believe. Think I've overstating this? About halfway through the movie I caught myself thinking about what I had to do at work the next day. I was watching a movie, a medium that only exists to take your mind off of your own existence and live vicariously through a character or set of characters, and was thinking about something as mundane as work. I'm not even sure how bad a movie has to be before that takes place because it's never happened to me before.

Seriously, this is garbage.

As of this writing, this film is sitting at a sub-3 star rating. Seriously? Sure the film's got it's problems, but it's pretty well written, pretty well acted, and solidly put together. Maybe England is going through a rash of hooligan films that I'm not aware of and this was the straw that broke the camel's back? That...or people are just kind of idiots.

OK, maybe idiots is a harsh term as there's no accounting for taste, but this film actually works pretty well on most levels. It moves along at a good clip, the characters develop well, and the story is though out. My only real gripe is the way the film jumps around between certain scenes. There's a bit of that "three weeks earlier" crap that makes it a bit hard to follow at times. But on the whole I'd say it's at least worth a watch.