Taken is an a direct line with The Searchers.

Rating: 3/10 (8 July 2011)

In all the reviews I have read of this movie, not one refers to its very clear and unmistakable debt to The Searchers, John Ford's much praised and sometimes justly maligned great western. There is reference to Commando and other movies, all of which probably are similarly indebted to Ford, but Taken has gone several steps further, in an almost shot by shot recap of some of the scenes of The Searchers. Granted, there is no Monument Valley in the background, but we have Liam Neeson grappling to have some sort of relationship with his daughter, while at the same time trying to deal with his former wife's present husband. This is a direct reflection of the more subtle relationship John Wayne had with his brother's wife, and his unstated but implied paternity of the girl kidnapped by the marauding Indians. The undercurrent of forced interracial sex in The Searchers is reflected in the much more explicit sexual slavery of Taken, but the father's desperate and unyielding search for his daughter is the same in both. At the very end of Taken, where Liam Neeson's character hands over his daughter to her mother and her mother's husband, who then prepare to get in their car and driver away, I expected Neeson to cross his right hand over and grab his left elbow, and then turn and walk off into the desert of his life. That it didn't happen is a tribute to Luc Besson, who probably thought he had taken (pun intended) the Searchers theme about as far as it could go, preferring instead to have a more hopeful ending. The Searchers continues to provide a basis for revenge and recovery stories, probably because it was the first of its kind, and dealt with basic themes of human connection, sexual tension, and ultimately the soul-destroying poverty of being alone even after accomplishing a great rescue. Taken is just one more step in the long line of movies repeating these themes. Besson knew what he was doing and where he got his ideas, I'm surprised no one else has worked it out as well.