Taken

Rating: 6/10 (16 April 2009)

I knew this was a kidnap film, and from the clips I saw it looked like a rather aggressive and violent film, and I heard about how it became a surprise smash hit at the cinemas, so I had to see why so many loved it so much. Basically Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is a former CIA operative who retired to be closer to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who lives with her mother Lenore (GoldenEye's Famke Janssen) and wealthy stepfather Stuart (Terminator 2: Judgement Day's Xander Berkeley) in California. At Kim's seventeenth birthday party Bryan buys her a karaoke machine, because of her passion for singing, but he gets upstaged when Stuart buys her a horse, coincidentally he saves threatened pop star Sheerah (Holly Valance), grateful she agrees to tutor his aspiring daughter. Later his daughter asks his permission to go on a trip to Paris with her friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy), he is very protective but agrees as long as she takes an international working cell phone and calls him every day, but they are actually following the band U2 during their European tour. Arriving in Paris the girls meet friendly young French man Peter (Nicolas Giraud) who offers them a cab ride and to a party, in fact he is gathering information about them. Kim does what Bryan told her to in calling him, but she gets a shock while talking as she watches Amanda being taken by intruders, so on the phone her dad instructs her what to do, hide in the next room under the bed, knowing she will be kidnapped he also tells her to shout physical descriptions of the intruders, which she does. Bryan tells Lenore and Stuart about Kim's kidnapping, and meeting his former colleague Sam (Leland Orser) he determines the men are Albanian sex traffickers who abduct female tourists, it is highly likely she will disappear and not be heard from again within 96 hours. Bryan travels to Paris, he finds the young man Peter there, but he chases him when trying to interrogate him, and before he can catch and ask him any questions he is hit by an oncoming truck, so hoping to find some clues he meets up with former French field agent Jean-Claude Pitrel (Olivier Rabourdin), who is slightly unhelpful, but does direct him to an East European gang who prostitute women. He finds a makeshift brothel, and there is a girl wearing Kim's jacket, so he fights off the guards and escapes with this girl, and when she awakens she gives him a little information he can follow about the house she met his daughter in, and there he confronts the thugs pretending to be from the government sent to renew a "contract". These thugs are tricked by Bryan into saying certain things, and he recognises the voice of Marko from Tropojë (Arben Bajraktaraj) as the man on the phone, so he wounds him and kills the other men, and restraining him he looks around the building at other kidnapped girls, letting them free, and he finds Amanda who is dead from some sort of overdose. Making a makeshift electrocution chair he tortures Marko to give him information about where his daughter is, and he tells that Kim is valuable as a virgin on the black market, and was sold to auctioneer Patrice St. Clair (Gérard Watkins), and before he leaves he leaves the chair to electrocute the thug to death. Bryan tells what he knows to Jean-Claude, but deduces he is corrupt, and he shoots Jean-Claude's wife Isabelle (Camille Japy) in the arm and threatens to kill her unless he is given St. Clair's address, and when he goes to the mansion he finds an auction going on in the basement. Many girls are being offered to the numerous bidders, and he is shocked when he sees Kim is the last girl on offer, and he forces a Middle Eastern bidder to purchase her, but before she can be collected he is captured and tied up, but he manages to get himself loose and kills the henchmen, and before killing him he forces St. Clair to tell him where his daughter has been taken. Bryan dashes and finds a luxury yacht owned by Raman the sheik (Nabil Massad), in a violent battle he kills the numerous guards aboard, the sheik himself is in his boudoir holding Kim with a knife to her throat, but her father shoots him in the head and saves her, Kim and her father return to the United States safe and sound and are reunited with Lenore and Stuart, and the ending sees Bryan introducing his daughter to singer Sheerah for her first singing lesson. Also starring Jonathan Gries as Casey and David Warshofsky as Bernie. Neeson is a fantastic choice as the middle-aged action hero with a "particular set of skills" who will stop at nothing to save his daughter, it is all about him to be honest, and the most memorable scene is him on the phone: "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." with the villain responding, "Good luck." The story is really gritty and gripping as the ex-serviceman hero goes from place to place searching or clues in tracking down his daughter, killing the bad guys along the way, the violence he uses to dispense of the villains are violent and part of the fun, an exciting and fantastically fun action drama. Good!