I Was Very Taken With Taken

Rating: 9/10 (24 October 2014)

Liam Neeson is currently enjoying an Indian summer of stardom, and it's all thanks to this movie. One he thought was going to go straight to DVD.
Plot In A Paragraph: Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) a retired CIA agent, goes on a rampage across Europe, and relies on his old skills to save his estranged daughter Kate (Maggie Grace) who has been kidnapped while on a trip to Paris.
Of course it's silly, unrealistic, and overly the top violent, but I enjoyed a lot of it. Liam Neeson is very good here, (somebody said to me "why would someone like Liam Neeson wan to get himself involved in something as nasty and insane as that" I disagree) and is most of the reason the movie works.
If it was a Sly Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger type of action hero cast as Mills, you would have expected the violent action scenes that followed the kidnapping with the hero coming out unscathed. With Neeson, you never know what will happen. And his "Certain set of skills" speech would have appeared cheesy, corny and predictable. Here it's cold, measured and utterly brilliant.
Famka Jenssen and Holly Valance are also here and both are OK.