Liam Takes Paris--takes it for all it's worth.

Rating: 5/10 (8 August 2012)

As exciting, well-made, fast-paced Hollywood thrillers go, it is hard to match Taken for sheer loathsomeness. Retired operative Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) lives alone on his CIA pension, his life taken up with barbecue nights with his CIA old-boy group, and with obsessing over his 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who is about to go on a trip to Paris with a girlfriend. Substitute "Paris" for "Bangkok red-light district" and you will get an idea of how Dad reacts to the idea of his little girl on her own in the City of Light. Considering that his face-to-face interactions with Kim and her mother (Famke Janssen) are hopelessly awkward, Bryan's obsession with his memories and his photo album, though played for pathos, start to seem a little creepy. But Dad's paranoia turns out to be well- founded; before Kim can unpack her toothbrush, the Albanian slave trade scoop up her and best girlfriend Amanda. On the phone with Kim while the kidnapping takes place, Bryan has just enough time to hear a few clues before he's begging his ex-wife's rich new husband for a private jet to get him to Paris in the 96 hours after which, authorities tell him, she will "disappear forever."
The trouble is, EVERYONE in Paris is in cahoots with the Albanian slavers. For all the help he gets, Bryan might as well have stayed in Los Angeles, taking on Disney, human smuggling and the Mexican drug trade. In this film from a French writer, director and producer, the French are all slimebags; even Bryan's old friend & fellow agent Jean- Claude (Olivier Rabourdin) refuses to get involved (Irish actor Neeson nails his American accent when he pronounces his old buddy's name "John- Clod") and when Bryan persists, amps up his resistance. The Albanians, and their chief clients the Arabs, are even worse. Bryan gets to revive his old skills, shooting, stabbing and breaking necks as if he was in his prime; almost no one he meets in Paris doesn't end up dead, and to a man they're the better for it. Fortunately at one point when Bryan gets in too deep, he is saved by that old standby; the pipe which has that one essential loose bracket the hero needs, and which also contains that pressurized steam which—at least in action movies—seems to be the lifeblood of large buildings—nothing so banal as the electricity or natural gas we use in real life. In the end, according to one IMDb contributor, Bryan kills 35 people to get his daughter back. But he fails to win our sympathy. Not once in Taken is he given a hint of the self-deprecating humour which is the hallmark of the successful action hero. Dour, socially awkward, good only at murder, he is a man better off on his own. Once off the plane, his evidently untraumatized daughter, bubbly as ever after her ordeal, rushes into her mother's arm with great relief; no doubt even worse than 4 days with Albanian slavers has been a trans-Atlantic flight next to her dour dad. And Famke Janssen—of whom we see too little—is clearly better off with the rich guy.