Taken
Liam Neeson in Taken
Do you remember the old Harrison Ford movie Frantic? The one where his wife gets kidnapped in France and he spends the entire movie trying to find her while whining incessantly about getting her back?
Taken kicks Frantic‘s ass up and down.
Liam Neeson is Bryan Mills, a retired black-ops spy who spends his days hanging around his old crew while picking up the occasional high-profile security job to keep himself occupied. His past has left him seeing the world as a very dangerous place, an attitude that has driven his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) into the arms of another (rich) man, taking with her the daughter (Kim, portrayed by Maggie Grace) he dotes on. But when his daughter begs to be allowed to take a trip to France with a friend, without parental supervision, against his better judgment he relents.
Kim is about to get . . . grabbed.
As you have no doubt seen in the trailer, things take a dark turn for Kim when she is kidnapped from her villa. This leads to Neeson’s over-the-phone plea and threat to her kidnappers: let her go, all is forgiven; refuse, and he’ll kill them all.
Obviously, the captors choose poorly.
What follows is a one-man wrecking machine taking out everyone who had any involvement in his daughter’s abduction, desperately trying to find her before she is lost. As he tears his way through the hierarchy of the underground sex-slave trade, the film plays as an hour-long chase scene. His methods are not for the faint of heart: suffice to say that Mills would disagree with the now-popular belief that torture is not an effective means of interrogation.
This movie makes no pretense of being anything but pure escapism, although the presence of Liam Neeson lends it a significant measure of respectability. But it’s a hell of a fun ride.
