Taken with "Taken"

Rating: 7/10 (27 January 2009)

After meeting a cute guy in the airport, a teenage girl proclaims, "I'm going to sleep with him" to her best friend. It's in these opening moments that "Taken" is very unnerving, showing naïve teenagers ready to cut loose from mom and dad only to discover that there is a darker side to the beauty of the international world. Yet this movie is an actioner from France filmmaker Luc Besson, known more for escapist entertainment like "The Transporter" and "The Professional", so its safe to say the seriousness of it starts and ends with that. This movie comes from a very real place, but its pure popcorn. The screenplay is by Besson and writing partner Robert Mark Kamen and cinematographer Pierre Morel makes his English-language debut behind the camera, and despite some things that go over the line, it gets the job done.
Liam Neeson stars as Bryan Mills, who we can assume did some pretty shady, black-op type things for the government. Now divorced and retired, he finds himself competing for the attention of his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) with her new richer father (Xander Berkeley), while being constantly at odds with his ex-wife (Famke Janssen). Against his better judgment he allows Kim to go on a vacation with a friend to Paris and as if he predicted it, he receives a call from Kim right as kidnappers are taking her friend and coming after her. From piecing together the background noise he overhears, he places them as an Albanian group with their hand in drugs and the sex trade. It's up to him to fly to Paris and put his "particular set of skills" to good use in order to save his daughter.
What follows is really a string of martial arts, gun battles, explosions, and car chases. The movie goes by in a brisk hour and 25 minutes and for the most part it's a well-made thriller with a good central performance from Liam Neeson. It's his show for most of the movie. Besson isn't interested in the heartbreak of the parents back home or what horrible things the girls being preyed on are suffering. Even the villains remain off-screen and one-dimensional for most of the time, unless Neeson is beating the bloody crap out of them. What Besson (and I'm sure the people looking to see this movie) is interested in is an intimidating badass who knows how to kick-ass and take names without mercy and Neeson covers that and more. He also shows the sadness and finds the humanity in a man desperately trying to find his daughter.
What bothered me about this movie though is the torture angle. I know the last thing your supposed to do is look for morality in what's basically a revenge fantasy but there are times when you just feel like Mills goes too far. Electrocuting a man for the schere joy of watching him suffer or shooting an innocent woman in the arm so as to get information from someone else isn't entertaining or the stuff that makes him particularly rootable. "Taken" works in the same vain as "Out for Justice" and is, for the most part, a fairly thrilling revenge flick, just sometimes it gets too carried away and crosses a line that you wish it knew not the cross.