Takeover – Movie Review


Artificial Intelligence, may sometimes result in to natural stupidity. With all due respect to machine learning, automation techniques and the innumerable scientists and engineers who code on computer data, at the end there is always a human intervention that is required to stop an accident or even an apocalypse from occurring. Takeover is a movie about this. 


Mel Badisson (Holly Mae Brood) is a student with acute computer skills who hacks in to the server of a local military to avoid them from using the aerodrome from flying, atleast for a few hours a day. And her motive – is to minimise the noise harm to animals in the surrounding. As she grows up, she turns up an ethical hacker, while front-ending herself as a system security specialist, that is ensuring her clients computer servers are safe from viruses and commercial hackers who demand money in lieu of letting go off their systems. 


In one such case, Mel intervenes in to the servers of Rotramax, an autonomous Bus development company which is about to launch its driverless bus service in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She senses harm to the client’s system and releases a Trojan Horse, to encrypt the information collected, which will ensure the data accrued by the company – mostly facial recognition stuff, will not be transmitted to anyone else. Meanwhile, she and her friends also hack in to private servers (of companies and persons) who commit mischief to the society and loot their ill-gotten wealth, thereby passing it on to charities.



After her assignment in the bus company, she notices an unknown man break in to her house with her photo; she rushes to the police only to find that the same men have arrived there too, having a hearty laugh with the guards on duty. Sensing suspicion, she feels from the location to the house of Thomas Deen (Geza Weisz), with whom she had a bad date night the previous evening, much to the chagrin of her mother. On Tv, they notice that Mel is being framed for a gruesome murder with her face clearly being visible through CCTv cameras. Meanwhile, the men arrive at Glen’s door and open firing. Not knowing what to do, the two flee only when Mel realises that her mobile phone is being tracked. The duo then leave the country and ride towards Antwerp, Belgium to meet Buddy (Frank Lammers), a fellow ethical hacker who is under the radar of Interpol. 


At his place, they discuss what’s been the background and that’s when Buddy mentions that the company which has built the software for the autonomous bus has a backlink to a Chinese company; and that the Chinese company is one of the official data collectors for the Chinese Government; and that the data collected from Rotramax will nonetheless be sent to China for profiling people. They realise the cartel and their motives behind and their ransom is to ensure Mel removes the Trojan Horse from the servers of Rotormax. However, there is no surety if her life will be spared once she does all this, now that she knows the root cause. 


Meanwhile, the gunmen reach their location and Buddy gets killed. The duo are once again on the run – Deen reaches out to the police for help while Mel rushes to the office of Rotramax to retrieve the video footage of her to prove her innocence. At the same time, the inaugural ride of the Bus is being launched with people on board to explore the first ever driverless vehicle in town. Things get messy as the gunman shoots the server equipment in a fit of rage and the autonomous bus goes rogue, damaging several vehicles and public property enroute. 


The Erasmus (river) bridge through which the bus is about to pass through – is also hacked by the baddies and there is a possibility that the Bus with 15 passengers including the company’s CEO will fall in to the river. Mel has two jobs on hand – prove her innocence as also stop the bus and save the passengers (much like the 90s film Speed). Well written tight-script with very few characters, each of whom make a mark. It’s not an edgy thriller at best, but serves the purpose of catching up a quick 90-minute film. It’s a Dutch language film with English translation voiceover as well as subtitles. Watch on Netflix.

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