TAKEN

Directed by Pierre Morel; written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen; director of photography, Michel Abramowicz; edited by Frederic Thoraval; music by Nathaniel Mechaly
With: Liam Neeson (Bryan), Maggie Grace (Kim), Leland Orser (Sam), Jon Gries (Casey), David Warshofsky (Bernie), Katie Cassidy (Amanda), Holly Valance (Sheerah), Xander Berkeley (Stuart),  and Famke Janssen (Lenore). Rated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes

Reviewed by Joel Johnson

If you have seen the trailer for Taken, then you know that there’s a desperate phone conversation between Liam Neeson (Bryan Mills) and Maggie Grace (playing Bryan Mills’s daughter, Kim) while intruders force their way into the Paris apartment where the daughter is staying. As Kim’s friend is being abducted, Neeson’s Bryan Mills tells his daughter to hide, and she scurries underneath a bed. He asks her to leave her cell phone on the floor and tells her that she should shout out anything she observes about the men because, he says, “they are going to take you.” She is then abruptly whisked out from under the bed by her heels.

This is the signature scene that sets in motion the entire film. The young woman has been seized by force, abducted, kidnapped. She has been taken away and taken prisoner. This is the archetypal scenario that confronts any father as his daughter begins to negotiate a world full of men. That those men will value his daughter less highly than he does and badly mistreat her. The instinct to protect one’s little girl (even as she has attained full adulthood) is very powerful, and it is often engaged by threats far more benign than what has happened to Bryan’s daughter, Kim. The entire audience-whether male or female, old or young, parent or childless-can identify with the sense of violation, fear, and fury that has been unleashed in Bryan Mills.

While most protective fathers come armed with little more than bluster, Neeson’s character is a retired covert operative for American intelligence. He has, as he warns one of his daughter’s abductors, “skills” that make him a “nightmare” for people like the ones who have taken his daughter. 

Pierre Morel, the young French director of Taken, is an accomplished director of action-adventure cinema. His first film Banlieue 13 (English title: 13^th District) was a high-energy, apocalyptic, odd-couple buddy film about a futuristic hole-in-the-wall section of Paris controlled by nuclear-armed criminals. This engaging little gem announced that France was no longer just looking abroad for films loaded with guns, explosions, violence, adrenaline, and testosterone. In essence, Morel knows a thing or two about taking the audience…for a ride-a wild ride. And that is exactly what Morel does with chase scenes—in vehicles and on foot—and fight scenes—with guns, knives, and anything else that is handy. Mills, after briefly consulting with his fellow semiretired covert operative alumni to get an idea of what he is up against, flies solo to Paris, determined to find his daughter and rescue her from a gang of white slavers run by Albanian expatriates. No father could have a more righteous cause, and clearly Albanians need to get listed as an ethnic group protected by political correctness so that they can’t be maligned so viciously. Needless to say, Paris may never quite be the same after Neeson’s Bryan Mills arrives. Neeson has been an actor who has always been very convincing in expressing anger, but he has rarely had a role that has made this his character’s primary emotion in a film so abundant with opportunities to devastatingly transmute that anger into aggression.

There’s also another way that the word “taken” can be used. That meaning is to use it in the phrase “being taken,” as in being deceived or bilked. While the film clearly defines a father’s instinctive protectiveness for his daughter, the film does little else to credibly develop any of the other characters or the relationships between those characters. Its best shot is showing the frosty relationship between Mills and his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen). None of the villains—and there are quite a few—are given enough to be a dramatically effective counterweight to Neeson’s towering paternal avenger. They pop up like mechanical jack-in-the-box targets on a military firearms training course. That probably gives you a pretty good idea how they fare. The good guys—the other victims and innocent bystanders—don’t fare much better in Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen’s script. They serve as effective plot devices but leave little resonance as individual human beings. The fate of Kim’s supposed best friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) is given less emotion than might be expressed about spilling something while dining. While it is vividly clear that Neeson’s character cares deeply about his daughter, it is much less clear that he understands her as a person—that he has any true awareness of her dreams and her desires as an adult woman.

If you are looking for a film that with a modicum of integrity explores the relationship between fathers and daughters, that provides a view of people struggling to be a family despite the fracture of divorce, or that shows the heavy shadings within humanity that allow the exploitation of one’s fellow beings, then you need not watch this movie. If you are looking for a full-bore guns-and-glory protagonist to take on all comers like Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland’s character in TV’s 24) defending Dick Cheney’s America, then this could be your favorite film. The adrenaline flows like Paris’s Seine, and one is vicariously with Neeson for every death-dealing act. Unfortunately after the evildoers are defeated and Neeson’s American princess has been safely returned to Los Angeles, I felt empty, having witnessed a film that featured both a garishly lurid (as well as highly unlikely) premise and the supremely callous dispatch of human life. I felt not the restoration of a righteous justice and a peaceful humanity, but how easy and steep the descent into cruelty and violence can be.