The best way to experience 93 minutes of your life....

Rating: 8/10 (16 May 2009)

If there is any single word to describe this whole film it would be 'Focus'. It could be argued that passion, sentiment, pace are important aspects of this movie but these qualities that merely augment the central theme of the single-minded purpose of a father whose world revolves around the security and happiness and love for his daughter. A famous young poet once commented, 'Love for your children is unidirectional, it has this unnecessary tendency to be suspicious'. While movies like Mrs Doubtfire, Father of the Bride and Meet the parents were more instrumental in depicting this truth, Taken wouldn't be too far either.
As I have previously said, this entire film is about the focus of a person who could virtually do anything in his power to rescue his daughter from the miseries of woman trafficking. But the trigger behind this focus is the factor of love, for which he could travel 30,000 miles to attend his daughter's birthday while he was on a job, decides to retire in order to stay close to her and lastly goes to Paris to rescue her when all others had given up every possible hope. An important attribute of a good actor is to immerse himself/herself completely in the character he/she is playing such that while watching a movie the audience is not conscious of the fact that it is an actor that is playing a role of a character, rather it is the existence of the character all by itself. Liam Neeson, undoubtedly falls in such a category and once again he has proved his versatility, power of expression and dynamic image through the portrayal of the character he has played. People, who have Schendler's List or Love Actually or Michael Collins in their memory while watching this movie, get prepared for a completely different dimension of dynamism from Neeson. Facial expression changes, one of his arsenals has been depicted in a number of situations, right in the beginning of the movie when after presenting his daughter with a karaoke player, she runs to ride on the horse his step father had bought her as a present, there was a sort of painful resignation in his expressions which seems to say a million things but express only one, 'I have nothing more to offer except my love'. Similarly while he hears his daughters shrieks and cries over the phone while she is being taken away and just before he utters the famous dialogue of this movie, his expression suggested a sort of unbearable helplessness, as if something was happening and he just couldn't do anything to prevent it. The other characters of this movie, played their role accordingly but there was really nothing much to offer from the perspective of their roles.
The film had good pace, a sort of continuity you would expect from such action movies like 'The Dark Knight' or the Bourne series movies. It is important that such movies maintain their pace most of the time and pause at critical moments only to give some time to the audience to assimilate the successive events they had seen. Background score normally plays a very important role and acts as a catalyst to the motion of the movie and in this case it did just as was expected. The action was quite realistic, especially the hand to hand combat and it was pretty obvious that Neeson had taken a good training at this fighting art, known as Shinshai Goshin kai, an art taught to the SAS members and that it avoided the special effects commonly seen today mostly in martial arts based movies. However, at times the events seemed quite unrealistic especially the fact that a single person can wreck havoc in a country like France for whatever wrongs he has faced and still come back safely leaving the entire security system in tatters. But in such movies, one needs to overlook such subtleties and concentrate on the holistic effects of the events. There was no effort to explain the process of girls trafficking and the prostitution business that is prospering in the French-Albanian border regions, but that was merely presented to add to the sensation or increase the criticality of the girl's abduction. There were no surprises, the film was predictable, but one would still be anxious to experience the excitement of the climax and that is what the effect of the pace of a movie can do.
It is a movie which is worth the ticket price, and one would never realize how one and half hour has passed. In a nutshell a compact, well- paced, well directed movie and not to forget experience the versatility and dynamism of a legendary actor who has won the heart of millions by his unforgettable performances in the past.