Bullet Points: Take Cover (2024)
Fresh off his appearance in The Killer’s Game, Scott Adkins is back deliver some serious action and thrills in 2024’s Take Cover…
- Fire Away: Scott Adkins plays Sam Lorde, one of the world’s best snipers. When we first meet Sam, he and his spotter Ken (Jack Parr) are on an assignment to take out a notorious arms dealer. But things don’t go exactly as planned… the arms dealer’s significant other ends up as collateral damage. While Sam still finishes the job, killing an innocent woman immediately starts messing with his head. But there’s not too much time to dwell on it, since the less than perfect execution of their mission, gave away their position and now Sam and Ken have to shoot and fight their way out of the building they were holed up in. The two manage to make their getaway and it isn’t long before they hear from their boss, Tamara (Alice Eve), who suggests Sam take some time off and clear his head. Ken invites Sam to join him for some fun in Amsterdam, but Sam goes home to be one with nature for a while.
- This Is It: Sooner or later Sam was going to have to get back to work, and he decides that his next assignment in Frankfurt is going to be his last assignment… Sam meets Ken at the airport and the two are whisked away to a swanky hotel, where Tamara has splurged on the penthouse suite for the dynamic duo. The view from the room is fantastic, but years of sniping make open windows unsettling for Sam, so he requests that the concierge close the curtains (which work via remote control). With two days before their assignment, Sam an Ken get to live in luxury and that’s about the time two beautiful masseuses, Mona and Lily, show up to help the guys “relax”. And the guys do relax, even let their guards down a bit and that’s when danger strikes… the concierge returns, opens the curtains and that’s when Sam realizes there’s a sniper aiming at him! It becomes obvious that Sam and Ken have been set up and that the hotel staff is in on it with Sam having to go toe to toe with the skillful concierge while avoiding sniper bullets at the same time.
- Sitting Ducks: The tension really starts to build as Sam, Ken, Mona and Lily find themselves unable to move about the room freely since they have extremely limited cover (and the remote for the curtains has gone missing in the chaos). At any moment, any one of them could be picked off by the sniper, which made Take Cover an edge of your seat experience. The tension and the violence ramps up as this standoff goes on and it is only broken up by Sam’s interactions with Mona, which provides the viewers with some of Sam’s backstory and why he got into the profession that he did. The movie does a great job of making you wonder if anyone will make it out of this penthouse alive!?
Recency bias aside, Take Cover felt like a real stand out movie in the filmography of Scott Adkins. It was a premise unlike any of Scott’s previous films, yet it still managed to work in a bit of Scott’s exceptional martial arts skills and deliver the action and violence one would expect from a Scott Adkins movie. But the real stand out aspect of Take Cover was Scott getting to play a character in Sam Lorde, who found himself in the midst of a crisis of conscience. The irony that Sam is about to be taken out the same way he took so many people out adds another interesting wrinkle to the film as well.
Take Cover has all the elements that will appeal to the action crowd, but plenty of other strong points that may appeal to a larger audience. Adkins and Parr have great chemistry as a pair of ball busting buddies, who are uniquely qualified for their line of work. And have to give props to Alice Eve as the mysterious voice on the other end of the phone, who makes her presence felt without actually being in the action herself. A definite recommend from me!
