My Belief Is Suspended By Lack Of Character Development

Rating: 7/10 (26 October 2010)

I viewed this film on the recommendation of a friend who kept getting Liam Neeson's name mixed up with actor Leslie Nielsen of The Naked Gun series and other movie spoofs. Needless to say, Taken left me shaken. A great action film using a subject as serious as sex trafficking for entertainment value grabbed me from the beginning, but didn't set well in its grossness and vilification of Arabs, Albanians and the French as the single-minded prostitute trader/murder caricatures they portrayed. Nor, for that matter, did the writers' motivations of actor Liam Neeson as a one-man Mission: Impossible wrecking crew forced to save his daughter alone after she and her friend are targeted at the airport by a marker and later dragged from their rental home after being set up to the end of being dehumanized and marketed as prostitutes.
Of the 1966 TV show Mission: Impossible, Martin Landau played the character of Rollin Hand and was married in real life to Barbara Bain—-best female undercover Central Intelligence Agent/Federal Bureau of Investigation-or-whatever agent/spy in television who played the character of Cinnamon Carter. What would it have looked like had Landau's character of Rollin not married Cinnamon of his same knowledge, life experience and common interest but Peggy Bundy of Married: With Children and with the bubble-head that Peggy was having taken no interest in his work nor him teaching her any skills by which to save herself before or after their marriage; neither did Rollin make an effort to rouse her interest and teach her anything of himself and his work? Thus, after some time of them giving birth to Kelly, Peggy, then deciding she can't take any more of Rollin's long work absences away from them both, files for divorce and later nabs J.R. Ewing of Dallas for new trophy husband and rich stepfather for Kelly and then learns nothing of his work either except how to spend all his money!
And so sets the plot for Taken with empty-headed Mama Lenore (Famke Janssen) wanting to give her seventeen-year-old daughter Kim played by Maggie Grace the chance of a lifetime—travel to Paris with girlfriend and equal minor Amanda—if she can get ex-husband and CIA retiree Bryan (Neeson) that she dated and married yet never knew nor trusted and is still hardened against to give Kim, as equally empty-headed as her mother, consent. And to that end, Bryan doesn't like the idea from the get-go, as with his ex-wife, in all seventeen years of Kim's life he has taught her no intelligence whatsoever--NOTHING of his expertise of self-defense and how to read people and warns: "No—I know the world!" But in his assigned role of carrying the plot as a one-man vigilante good-guy, Bryan consents. Yet at the airport, he learns Kim and Mama have lied to him—the whole trip concerned Kim and Amanda's plan of tracking a U2 concert tour throughout Europe with some nineteen-year-old cousins—only later does gullible Kim realize distrusting Dad was right on learning trusted friend Amanda had lied to her—the cousins they were supposed have hooked up with were in Spain and they had the house to themselves! Before Kim can tell Dad--whose promised call to him on her safe arrival she had not made--that Amanda had lied to her and they were in Paris alone, Bryan's worst fear is realized as Kim tells him from the bathroom that Amanda's being grabbed by two men and carried out screaming. With the traffickers coming for her also, Bryan instructs her over the phone to yell out what they're wearing, color of hair, their smells, body defects and the like as leads for him to follow as he tapes the call, with it ending in her giving him NONE. Yet as he then has to give his ex-wife the bad news Kim's been kidnapped by sex slave traders, to add meat to Bryan's role, rich second husband Stuart--who had just outdone his birthday gift to Kim of a Karaoke machine by giving her a Thoroughbred--is so equally a one-dimensional still drawing that he had no money and no one out of all his family and worldly business connections to call on in proper J.R.-speak and pay to infiltrate Paris behind Bryan in support of his Mission: Impossible of saving his stepdaughter COLLECTIVELY?
And in the process of escaping through fires, flipped cars, boats and every scrape with barely a scratch while killing every villain pursuing him with barely a gunshot wound, Bryan succeeds in saving Kim single-handedly--and with no lead given him from her—and empty-headed Lenore that had never fit him is so happy to have her daughter back safe and sound that she doesn't even ask the ex-husband she never knew nor respected how he found their daughter; and neither, for that matter, does 'bubble-head' Kim!