Taken

It all started with the trailer. There was this moment I had to see. I saw it in the trailer, but I needed to see it how it was meant to be seen. I needed to witness Liam Neeson calmly but intensely saying "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." That was all I needed.

Bryan Mills(Neeson) spent a long time as a "prevention agent" for The American government. He retired to finally get close to his daughter, Kim, something he could not do while preventing things. His daughter(Maggie Grace), though, wants to go to Paris with a friend for the summer. Bryan does not like it but relents, under conditions. The first condition being she must call him the second she lands. She forgets. He gets nervous. He keeps calling her. Kim and her friend met a cute guy at the airport. Her friend told the boy too much information. Next thing you know, Kim calls daddy just in time to be kidnapped. With just a voice to go on, Bryan calls a friend from his old job and he finds out a whole lot. He is on a plane and soon people are dying. We are given a 96 hour timeline, because, well, deadlines are important in action movies. They make the movies feel more intense and just a bit crazier.

Taken is another entry into the new style of action movie where all the fighting is minimal and there is not a whole lot of emotion in the fighting. It takes a seemingly unlikely male, Liam Neeson and turns him into a total bad ass and Neeson wears it well. Decked out in long black coats and rarely letting his voice rise above a Jack Bauer inspired whisper yell. In fact, the Jack Bauer, or 24 similarities do not end there. The plot unfolds very much like 24, where who we think is the main villain dies because there is someone else who is the main villain and so on like that. Eventually the movie lands itself on a boat, where Neeson is really quite impressive in his actioning.

The movie is very frenetically paced and you are not going to get lost in it and perhaps the pacing moves so quickly to keep you from questioning things, but I enjoyed the ride. I like that Neeson straight up shoots people without warning and I like that electricity is used int he most brutal ways. I was totally into the car chase in the sand dunes and was willing to believe 1 man can take down an entire sex trade ring, especially if that man is Liam Neeson. If nothing else I learned that a real bad ass knows the difference of an unloaded and a loaded gun just by the weight.

Final Grade: B-