3384. Take Me (2017)

Starring: Pat Healy, Taylor Schilling, Alycia Delmore

Director: Pat Healy

Running Time: 83 mins

Take Me is an American film about a man who works as a simulated kidnapper, paid by clients to kidnap them. However, when he takes a woman who claims not to have asked for an abduction, things take a bad, bad turn.

This film is really, really irritating at times. But that’s why I love it. Never as dark or disturbing as it perhaps wants to be, Take Me counts on a hilariously hectic story to deliver some really great laughs throughout, as well as a delightfully uncomfortable series of twists and turns that will have your head in a real jumble.

The premise is simple, a man gets paid by people to kidnap them. He kidnaps a woman who’s paid him, and things go very, very wrong. There’s not much else to say about the overarching story, and there’s very little in the way of character development beneath the surface.

But it doesn’t matter. Because as thin on the ground as Take Me can be, it overdelivers with a manic series of plot twists that make no sense whatsoever, and prove painfully irritating yet delightfully hilarious every time one appears.

I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for you, as the plot starts twisting on itself within the first act, but it suffices to say that while Take Me has a very simple premise, it’s far from a predictable movie, constantly pulling the rug out from underneath you as if it’s doing it as some kind of cruel joke.

The meat of the story isn’t immensely dark, nor is it darkly hilarious, but it’s the mania of the plot’s constantly flip-flopping reality that makes Take Me such a captivating and entertaining watch from start to finish. Each twist is more irritating than the last, as everything you think you knew is immediately discounted in favour of something more ridiculous, but it makes for a weirdly entertaining experience.

The movie isn’t perhaps as smart as it thinks it is, and there’s an element of laughability in its sheer ridiculousness, but it never takes itself too seriously either, which makes a world of difference to enjoying the movie.

Leads Taylor Schilling and Pat Healy work perfectly together as warring co-stars of this bizarre kidnap scheme gone wrong, and the screwball element of their relationship makes for some of the biggest laughs of the whole movie, playing in nicely to a few of its most outlandish twists.

In short, I had a whale of a time with Take Me. Perhaps more ridiculous than intended, the film is still a hugely entertaining watch, counting on an infuriatingly endless stream of ridiculous plot twists that turn it into a manically hilarious watch from start to finish. So, that’s why I’m giving it a 7.6 overall.