We discuss the ending of the Netflix film The Takeover (2022), which will contain major spoilers.
The Takeover is a safe action thriller on Netflix that uses classic tropes and doesn’t offer much excitement or intrigue but makes for an easy watch.
The film begins with a man driving to an army base, listening to classical music. He looks like a geeky dad, and as soon as he enters, he sets to check out the system errors they’re experiencing. He’s a hacker. All units start to shut down, and as he types furiously, he discovers where the hack is coming from. To everyone’s surprise, it’s local. They find that a sixteen-year-old hacker, Mel (Holly Mae Brood ), was hacking into the military operating system just to prevent jet noise to help the local seals. Buddy, clearly impressed, makes a deal that if she tells him how she did this, he will tell her how he found her.
Jump forward to ten years later, while in her day job, Mel spots a random bug inside a facial recognition-driven bus and immediately blocks it with a trojan horse. Hacking into a serious database, Mel has crossed the wrong people, who then release a fake video that “shows” her murdering someone, framing her, and putting the police on her trail. Mel is now on a mission to hide from the police and clear her name.
The film follows her doing all it takes to prove her innocence, despite the consequences. Mel goes into hiding with the guy she had the bad blind date with, Thomas. As he’s not a hacker, and with this great fake, Mel needs all the help she can get. This leads her online friends to say she needs Buddy to help clear her name. Mel refuses to contact him. We learn this is because she has previously turned him in to the police, so he is also a wanted man too.
On the run, Buddy finds Mel, and all three now try to decipher who is blackmailing her. They discover that Mel hacked the Chinese government, and they do not want anything Mel discovered to come to light as it will cause international drama. They’re trying to ruin Mel’s reputation so no one would believe what she said/found.
The Takeover ending explained – how does Mel prove her innocence?
Eventually, the bad British villain Rogers kills Buddy, and Mel’s lover-boy is captured by the police. Mel flees to go back and re-enter and re-hack the company she did at the beginning to find the evidence to exploit them to prove her innocence. While hacking, she is found by Rogers, who points a gun to her head. In true maverick style, she manages to escape and run away.
Only towards the end do we have a small fight before Mel is captured. Rogers begins to shoot at the computers in the server room, causing the servers to crash and the driverless buses on the streets to malfunction, putting people’s lives at risk.
Mel takes the police to prove her innocence and then attempts to hack into the bus to stop it from running. Thomas becomes the action hero we needed and wanted in this film as he steals Buddy’s car and hijacks the bus to help slow it down and stop it before it reaches the river. Together they manage to stop the bus and save everyone.
The final scene sees Mel working on her laptop, getting a message from Buddy, which is automated if he’s not online for three days which means he’s probably dead. Buddy is telling her he’s proud of her and wants her to change the world. Mel and Thomas sit by the river. Mel puts her arm around him, then challenges him to three more laps. They run off camera and we cut to the credits.
This film does have a strong female protagonist, who begins the film being independent and driven, and even when helped by other male characters in proving her innocence, the character doesn’t lose these qualities. Mel is helped by a man who she once outsmarted and then by a dumb guy she ran out on, on their first date. This is smart, although, in the end, it doesn’t feel as if her character learned or developed into anything; her story arc was quite poor.
The ending of The Takeover has the drama and action we needed from the start, and as well as saving herself, Mel is able to save the lives of innocent victims, making her a true, nerdy hero. After this, she is able to go back to her life, trying to make the world a better place by hacking. This film does make hacking seem more positive and something that can have a good influence on the world, which is not the way in which we’ve viewed and been shown hackers in the past.
The whole film is a cat-and-mouse chase, the focus being on the running rather than the hacking itself. For an action-thriller, it lacked a lot of intrigue and excitement, as when you’re running, you’re not confronting or fighting. The ending is a happy one, with Mel clearing her name and making a new friend.
What did you think of the ending of the Netflix film The Takeover (2022)? Comment below.
