blam blam pow pow i wish liam neeson were my daddy too

Rating: 7/10 (8 November 2008)

**CONTAINS NO MORE SPOILERS THAN IN A MAGAZINE REVIEW, BUT THEN AGAIN IF YOU'RE SENSITIVE, DON'T READ**
After listening in his cell phone, to the sound of his seventeen year old daughter being dragged away and brutally kidnapped by unknown brutes, the former Special Forces Agent Ryan (Liam Neeson) quietly waits until somebody picks up the phone. Then he says:
"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. 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."
A few quiet seconds pass before a voice in the other end replies:
"Good luck"
If this sounds exciting to you, it's just the beginning. TAKEN is one of those rare gems in it's genre, a simple and wonderfully well crafted action movie where Liam Neeson plays previously mentioned ex-spy; a mediocre and somewhat pitiful man that while spending a career for his country, has been neglecting his family. Now, when the marriage is broken and the daughter already is seventeen, he bravely attempts good fatherhood, even though he barely knows who his daughter is these days, and even though the ex-wife hates him and has re-married with a rich square, who buys the daughter a horse as a sweet seventeen-gift.
The whole shabang gets rolling when our anti-hero is forced to agree to his daughter going for a trip overseas to Paris with her best friend - even though Daddy (through paranoia, or supernatural knowledge about the future) sense trouble. The minute she sets foot in Paris she is abducted by horrible villains connected to the trafficking industry - and our friend Liam has to give up what he's bad at, buying birthday gifts, and start doing what he does best - knock off bad guys.
Because, after that there's just one direction and that is full throttle, dead ahead. The revenge/rescue-action blows high in the sky - Neeson is undeniably great as a well dressed Rambo when he in one white knuckle sequence after another tracks down the big shot's bigger shot's biggest shot's even bigger shot, passing all limits of rage to stack up the bad guys in a body pile and bring back his daughter.
Luc Besson had a finger in the screenplay, and you can tell. For one thing, the setup is beautifully done for it's genre, that James Cameron-ish formula where you as quick as possible set up the score (which takes about fifteen minutes) and then hit the pedal to the floor. But there is a human edge to the story too, many people have had complaints about the "boring first part" of the movie, but it serves a point. Neeson gets time enough to make a nice and believable portrait in the beginning, and that is why we like him through the rest of the movie, and that is also why we totally agree that his every act of violence is, well, "justified".
Apart from that, there's no need to think too much in this movie - one great hold-on-to-your-adrenalin-scene follows another, it's the dark knight on a vendetta, bourne with balls, james bond not with a vodka martini but with a big damn scotch on the rocks - and when the 90 minutes suddenly have passed, you get that feeling you get when the roller-coaster ride has stopped - already over? Better get back in line, I mean jeez, we just have to do this one more time.
No action fan alive can miss this film. There is one line in particular that concludes the experience: ".....We can nego"BOOM