Taken

(2009)

Directed by

Pierre Morel

Review by Zach Saltz

Pierre Morel’s Taken is a pleasant return to a simpler, more straightforward brand of action picture.  Gone are the multiple mind-numbing twists of the Bourne series, the questionable ethical imperatives of The Dark Knight, and the quirky humor of the Transporter films; this is a raw, bare, bone-crushing tale of bad guys doing very bad things and the one everyman hero somehow impervious to both immorality and flying bullets (but still dashing in a suit even after having been shot several times) who imposes his violent revenge on the bad guys at the cost of exploding buildings, destroyed boats, and a poor Albanian translator who simply does not understand why he is there in the first place.

The episodic story seems recycled from a rehashed 24 episode, but a movie like this does not require originality: Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, an ex-government operative who spends his newfound retirement time trying to reconnect with his teenaged daughter, Kim, even as his bitter ex-wife looks on in disgust.  When Kim announces plans to travel to Paris – where she will be accompanied only by her friends – Bryan acts as the lone skeptical voice of reason.  “I don't think a seventeen-year-old should be traveling alone,” he tells his daughter, but to no avail: soon, he is dropping her off at the airport and, like other embarrassing parents, signing with his hands to call him as soon as she arrives.

But of course Bryan proves correct in his initial reticence, and Kim and her friend are quickly kidnapped by a group of Albanian hoods who sell them into a sex slave operation.  As soon as Byran is told he has 96 hours to get his daughter back, he boards a jet, buys an Albanian dictionary, and hits the Parisian red-light district.  Along the way, he makes enemies with the corrupt head of the Paris police, not so much because he threatens to expose the shady backroom dealings of the force with the hoods, but because there is a very real chance Bryan may in fact destroy the entire city before he reaches his daughter (“Jean Claude, I'll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to,” he tells him.)

While most other action movies of this caliber would invest a considerable amount of time in overwrought backstory attempting to conspiratorially connect the sex slave sting with other conspicuous characters in the story (I was hedging my bets that Kim’s obnoxiously rich new stepfather was involved in the scheme somehow), Taken ignores this temptation and is content to provide more revolving fists than revelations.  That is not to say that the story here is weak, however; props must be given to the first half hour of the movie, which wisely takes time in building up considerable suspense in the story’s set-up.

But it is the action sequences that make Taken deliver, and director Morel (along with screenwriter Luc Bresson) provide audiences with remarkably entertaining stunts and chases through back alleys and dark corners, all the while maintaining its PG-13 rating.  Indeed, the fact that Taken is PG-13 in the first place may reveal something about film violence on a whole – that audiences may want it, but they do not wish to see its unglamorous effects in full detail.  This is why unrealistic PG-13 violence exists: to maintain the light atmosphere of an action flick rather than get tied up in the moral consequences of killing.  There is not a single ounce of blood spilt in the picture, and while this may understandably bother some cynical observers, I felt that such portrayals would have been a waste of time in a movie as effervescent and rapid-fire as this.

Another surprise of Taken is Liam Neeson’s husky performance as Bryan.  It is hard to believe someone as unnerved and savage as the Bryan character could be portrayed effectively by the same sweet-faced actor who played the benevolent Oskar Schindler, as well as the sympathetic stepfather to the love-sick son in Love Actually.  Neeson’s Bryan is a little like Daniel Craig’s “new” James Bond – physically menacing and not needing the same high-tech gadgetry as other cinematic vigilantes.

Taken is the type of film Clint Eastwood would have made not too long ago, with its hero rigidly defying both the indignant people around him, as well as the orders to follow the aims of a society pooled with corrupt corrigibles.  It is a film made with few cheap frills and surprises – just a good old fashioned revenge story, whose simplicity and economy of story prove to resonate better than other films of the same genre trying to both outbulk and outwit its confused viewers.

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