serviceable thriller made special by Neeson

Rating: 6/10 (13 July 2009)

Bryan Mills is a retired CIA operative whose seventeen-year-old daughter is kidnapped by a bunch of Albanian white-slave traffickers the moment she arrives in Paris. Instantly, Mills launches into secret agent mode, utilizing all the tricks-of-the-trade he picked up during his years in the service to single-handedly track down his daughter and bring her abductors to justice. Clearly, James Bond has nothing on this guy.
As action thrillers go, "Taken" is considerably less plausible than most (which is saying a great deal), filled as it is with preposterous coincidences and feats of superhuman dexterity, but director Pierre Morel does know how to get the adrenaline pumping - which, let's face it, is all one really asks for from a high-octane popcorn movie such as this one.
To make the movie more "relatable" for the audience, screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen have concocted a rather dreadful scenario in which Mills has quit his job and moved to California so he will be able to spend more time with his daughter, only to find that he now has to compete with her gazillionaire step daddy for her attention and affection. But all that malarkey is done away with in the early stages and - good news for action fans - once the movie hits the throttle, it never lets up.
The European tourism industry is bound to take something of a hit with this film - and, seriously, all of this just to get some rich guys laid? Don't they have just regular old call-girls in Paris anymore? - but the commercial success of the movie has been nothing less than a godsend for Liam Neeson's career and pocketbook.
With "Taken," a new action hero is born.