Liam Nesson as former intelligence agent Bryan Mills in Taken is about as bad ass as Jason Bourne and Batman combined. He makes Jack Bauer look like a kindergarten teacher and a kindergarten teacher like a sock puppet. As far as revenge pictures go, Taken is a high energy, no holds barred roller coaster through the Parisian underworld. Shot with highly kinetic action and frantic pacing by Pierre Morel, who directed the excellent parkour-inspired District 13, Taken pushes the right buttons to do a little better than the average revenge-fuelled, action picture thanks to a decently played out story and a seriously Mad-as-Heck leading man.
But it all begins with Bryan’s daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and her desire to spend two weeks of summer vacation in Paris with her friend Amanda. Being a former super-spy, Bryan’s hesitant, but his daughter’s happiness is his paramount concern so he gives her the okay. But no sooner does Kim arrive in Paris that she’s taken by kidnappers while on the phone with Bryan. After hearing his daughter scream as she’s taken away, Bryan tells the kidnapper, “If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”
And the chase is on. Bryan has 96 hours to recover Kim before she’s gone forever, the probable victim of an Albanian smuggling ring that takes young, female tourists and forces them into a life of heroin-fuelled prostitution. Filled with over-the-top action, Taken’s like a SVU episode of the Bourne series with corrupt cops and sex traffickers. And at the centre of it all is Neeson putting on a pretty scary façade as a father prepared to do anything to secure his daughter’s safety. The violence is relentless, but it’s actually kind of bloodless. It is attention grabbing though; it’s an edge-of-your seat, action thriller where the only question is how bad Bryan’s going to tear up the kidnappers.
It’s simple, sure. Coincidence abounds in this film that sees Kim get into trouble in about 90 seconds after getting off the airplane in Paris, just like her father predicted. And Bryan seems unusually adept at tracking down a group of unknown gangster across a foreign city. But hey, who cares? We didn’t come here to ask questions, we came to be entertained. And Taken certainly does deliver value added entertainment with revenge fantasies and thrilling kills. We know who the good guy is and we know who the bad guys are and what they deserve. It’s so wonderfully cut and dry; the kind of filmmaking simplicity that can only come from the French. For what Taken is, it’s perfection.
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