Take the 10

It was free on Netflix so I watched it, needing a comedy.

Characters amusing for their foolishness and mutual unreliability. It recalls Houston's "Beat the Devil" with Bogart.

Everyone has a serious problem. You might say their problems get resolved, not solved.

I admire actors who can create work for themselves and that is what has happened here. Produced, written and directed by one of the leads.

Don't believe the reviewer who said this was gay propaganda. There's about 20 seconds of superficial gay angle, purely as a joke.

The story is fine but the acting is subpar and the humour is not existent. I think I chuckled once or twice in the whole thing. It felt like a chore to finish it.

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.

Awful train wreck of a watch, will not watch again, and can't recommend.

The writing in this is awful: the structure and the character work are horrible, and the plot(s) is barely passable, but the execution could be a significant factor.

Josh Peck has clearly lucked out networking since his child acting career to even be in this piece of garbage, and Tony Revolori is so wildly unlikable I even hate him being in Spiderman as Flash, the guy you're supposed to hate: I don't even like him for not liking him. Chester Tam is completely replaceable: he doesn't do a bad job, it just is an empty role.

Kevin Corrigan is the only male actor worth mentioning in a positive light. He has the bare minimum of good acting in this and reminded me that movie COULD have gotten better at some point.

The ladies are the best parts of this movie. Stella Maeva ("The Magicians") and Cleopatra Coleman ("Last Man on Earth") have the best characters: empowered even without authoritative roles, and they're so underwritten that they basically get paid for looking beautiful and doing a days worth of decent acting.

I really wish I had anything else positive to say about the movie, but when the best thing you can say about a movie is, "I like x" or "x is gorgeous", it's a high sign that the movie isn't worth the time.

'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.