sour lemon

Rating: 1/10 (14 June 2009)

Taken is a serious lemon. Neeson deserves a better script. Viewers deserve a better movie.
This is so monomaniacal it becomes thuddingly unsubtle in the first ten minutes. We get sentiment and we get violence, and we get super-creepy father/daughter scenes, that made my toes curl. Across his career, Luc Besson vacillates between almost passable escapism (Fifth Element) and utterly unredeemable dreck (Big Blue, Subway, Leon) The script is so bare-bones that it results in laugh-out-loud developments. 45 minutes after lading in Paris, a girl is kidnapped for a Euro-prostitution ring? Um, yeah. And you can identify a single criminal in Europe from two words spoken into a phone! Liam Neeson passes himself off as a French agent without speaking French or having an accent. Terrific. There's dumb, there's DUMB! and then there's Taken.