Movies in Brief: 'Take'

If you thought the vehicular homicide and obsessive revenge plotline of "Reservation Road" was a hoot, you'll absolutely adore "Take." This heap of heavy-handed misery serves as a platform for actress Minnie Driver to give one of those histrionic Lifetime channel meltdown performances, playing a working-class mom whose learning-disabled son gets snuffed in a robbery attempt gone badly wrong.

Written and directed by Charles Oliver, "Take" has a purposefully "indie" veneer: desaturated color, a narrative detailed in flashbacks triggered by coy visual cues, a minimalist script, and an Oscar-nominated star of a hit cable comedy ("The Riches") working cheap, no doubt, for the sake of a presumably gutsy role. This doesn't all add up to another "21 Grams" — which wasn't even very good. The film juxtaposes the back stories of Ms. Driver's harried Ana and a gambling junkie named Saul (Jeremy Renner), who takes drastic action in order to pay off a large debt. As their paths come closer to a collision, the present-moment Ana is driving across the desert to the prison where Saul awaits his execution by lethal injection. Both of them ruefully contemplate his crimes.

Beneath the often annoying and repetitive exposition — everything about the story is telegraphed in the first five minutes — the film's sense of social burden is oppressive. Even though this latter-day Saul has already experienced a kind of spiritual transformation, he's ambivalent at best when a prison minister quotes him scripture. Yet what "Take" most evokes is the sort of inspirational drama aired on religious cable networks, episodes in which the sinner and the sinned-against both submit to the higher power and find grace and forgiveness. (Okay, so there's the matter of that dead 9-year-old in a car trunk.) But unlike secular variations, from "Highway to Heaven" to "Saving Grace," this an airless exercise whose message suffocates under the thickening angst.