Thrilling with some flaws here and there but very good

Rating: 9/10 (2 April 2011)

According to movies, Paris is not safe anymore on the first day you get there! First, kidnappers took Harrison Ford's wife in "Frantic"; now they took Liam Neeson's daughter and her friend in the action thriller film "Taken", where both girls will be sold as prostitutes by Albanians slave traders. But instead of a vulnerable doctor like the one presented in Polanski's film, our hero is a former CIA agent with skillful tactics that goes to rescue his daughter from the evil.
Among the favorable points of this film, besides a great performance by Neeson, is the way this father manages to save his daughter and the techniques he uses to track her last steps after being kidnapped. Small things that makes a total difference like hearing the traders conversations on the phone or even asking his daughter before she was taken to mention a few characteristics of these people (but this moment fails a little if one considers the impossibility of someone doing so since she was very distressed, and how come these guys show up without wearing masks which would make impossible their recognition?). Of course, some of these things are pure exaggeration but as long as the film played with some tension, nice action sequences and a solid drama involving human trafficking and all the desperation of the main character, we are thrilled with a above the average flick.
A few things could be worked better or played more fairly and that is 1) the editing, because we need to know who is beating who. The fights are great, Neeson is very believable in doing all this and writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen provided to the main character lots of combat with Nagasu Do, a interesting and mixed martial art style, but the director, editor and the camera went all nuts and they wouldn't allow us to see precisely what was going on in key moments; 2) the cold-blooded character played by Neeson and his coldness didn't work at some moments, most notably where he shoots at a woman trying to discover where one of the traders were. This was something surprisingly strange to see it, didn't work so good, and this kind of implacability works better in a Bond film or a Schwarzenegger type of film (and "Taken" resembles "Commando" a little bit). It is comprehensible in the context used for this film, here's a desperate father trying to save his daughter in a short period of time, he did way worst to the guys who took her but for some reason this was too strange, and this woman wasn't even involved in the whole situation although her husband was.
It might be an overdone and clichéd picture but it has a lot of good things to show, it's well made, well acted with a nice supporting cast with names like Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Leland Orser, Jon Gries and Xander Berkeley, and the action is great. 9/10