This is my kind of movie, California dad goes after the crooks who kidnapped his young daughter in Paris.

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 2009)

Luc Besson writes the kinds of movies I enjoy watching. Not all of his, but movies like "Nikita", "Messenger", and "Leon" are some of my favorites. He co-wrote this movie, "Taken", and it is a good one. Not surprisingly it goes back to a city he knows well, Paris.
Liam Neeson is a mostly retired Bryan Mills. We don't exactly know what he did before retirement, but in conversations with his 3 buddies, and when we see him defend a young singer when he is hired for one gig as a bodyguard, we know he has skills most 50-ish men don't have.
We also find out that he has been mostly absent in the growing-up years of his 17-year-old daughter, but he has moved to Southern California to be close enough to be in her life.
Famke Janssen is Bryan's ex-wife Lenore. She is now married to a wealthy man who has made life easy for her and the daughter.
With that as background, the story starts when the daughter requests to go to Paris to stay with a friend's relatives, and spend a lot of time visiting Paris museums and libraries. But because she is a minor both parents have to approve of her traveling out of the country. Bryan is very reluctant, he has seen enough to know it is dangerous for naive teen girls to be traveling alone. Add to that a deception ... the girls really had a multi-city European trip planned to follow around their favorite rock group in a musical tour. Lenore knew this but withheld that from Bryan.
After a scene Bryan, with grave reservations, agreed to let his daughter go, but only if she would call him as soon as she arrived, and each day to assure him she was OK. As soon as the two girls got to Paris things started to go bad, and Bryan had to press himself into action.
I like this movie because it is a classic matching of wits of a determined good guy, Bryan, against the criminal element. Plus it is long enough at 90 minutes to tell the story but still short enough to never get boring. I highly recommend it.
SPOILERS FOLLOW: There is an Albanian criminal element operating in Paris to nab pretty, young girls and sell them into sexual slavery. They employ young men to attract the attention of targets by offering to share a cab ride from the airport. This lets them know where the girls are staying so that a trained team can come in and kidnap the girls. Which is what happens here, made easier by the adult relatives being in Spain, details they share with the young man. But Bryan is on the phone with his daughter when the kidnappers arrive, and he is able via tape recording to get important clues, plus a brief conversation where he tells the kidnapper that if he doesn't release the teens right away he would be tracked down and killed. "Good luck" says the crook, and these two words enable Bryan to know when he met him face-to-face. Bryan is very good at what he does, he finds the girls, kills all the crooks eventually, and even in the process exposes some police payola activity which ends up giving him his free pass to leave France.