David O'ConnellTaken
January 16th 2009 02:45
Liam Neeson must have known he was stepping into Charles Bronson territory when he signed on the dotted line for Pierre Morel’s 2008 revenge thriller. Though, admittedly, not having his entire family wiped from the planet by scum as Bronson did in Death Wish and its repetitive sequels, when the daughter Bryan Mills shares with estranged wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) is kidnapped by a network of repugnant Albanians in Paris with their nefarious sideline in human trafficking, we know what's coming with an inevitability that verges on painful.
Maggie Grace is Kim, the appropriately naive 17 year-old, who under the pretense of exploring the sights of Paris and its culturally rich heritage with dim-witted friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) - who’s 17 going on 12 - is actually planning a tour of Europe in the wake of favourite rock band U2. Mills has been duped by his daughter but has a bad feeling from the start, and within minutes of touchdown the two innocents are imperiled as a friendly, attractive local swamps them with phony chat-up lines that work like a charm.
You can’t help admiring the simplicity of Taken’s premise, and the economy with which it’s executed, omitting the need for anything other than minimal exposition. And then there’s the clinical brutality with which Mills exacts revenge, proving to be a warrior on the warpath who will annihilate any human being posing as an obstacle in his way.
It doesn’t exactly prove favourable to the men in black that he’s also a paranoid former security agent with an oblique past, a self-confessed ‘Preventor’ of bad things with skills in every facet of battle needed to offset the requirement of police intervention. Mills is a one-man wrecking crew whose single-mindedness reveals itself in a scarily proficient modus operandi when he gets access to the first clues.
Taken, co-written by famed director Luc Besson, is extremely violent, though there aren’t copious amounts of blood spilt, Mills using his fighting skills to compliment his almighty, expert aim with a gun. In contrast of course, not a single opponent has a clue how to handle weapons, their dozens of bullets miraculously spraying upward, sideward – somehow always managing to miss their intended target. He sustains a few nicks towards the end, suggesting that if he can bleed they surely could kill him in a theoretical sense - but it won't be happening in this film.
Perfectly compacted into 85 breakneck minutes, Taken sets out to provide a visceral wallop to its audience whilst remaining thoroughly entertaining down to its last bullet and the predictably sappy finale. Dispatching the bad guys will never trouble our conscience either, that part is easy: they’re uniformly repulsive, disgusting, unshaved, ultimately hapless foreigners who sit around playing cards whilst their beautiful prizes are drugged up and chained to unwashed beds, waiting for their next ‘client’ to ravage them and ease a little more of Albania’s foreign debt.
The further Mills delves into his daughter’s disappearance the higher up the corruption seems to have penetrated, and before his quest is over the stack of strewn bodies will be high enough to fill the ocean liner on which the climax is reached.
Taken is many things: efficient, absurd, brutal, kinetic, and deliriously generic - in short, thoroughly enjoyable mindless fare. With the imposing figure of Neeson cutting a swath through the best in scum and degradation that the Parisian underworld has to offer, I knew I was in good hands, his towering presence enough to intimidate any human being with a pathetic gun or knife in their bumbling hands.
I will undoubtedly watch this riveting film again some day, enjoying the idea of such a reputable actor standing in for a crusading force of nature. (Indeed, Oskar Schindler, Michael Collins and Rob Roy MacGregor would be proud). For now though, I just need a cleansing shower.
Maggie Grace is Kim, the appropriately naive 17 year-old, who under the pretense of exploring the sights of Paris and its culturally rich heritage with dim-witted friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) - who’s 17 going on 12 - is actually planning a tour of Europe in the wake of favourite rock band U2. Mills has been duped by his daughter but has a bad feeling from the start, and within minutes of touchdown the two innocents are imperiled as a friendly, attractive local swamps them with phony chat-up lines that work like a charm.
You can’t help admiring the simplicity of Taken’s premise, and the economy with which it’s executed, omitting the need for anything other than minimal exposition. And then there’s the clinical brutality with which Mills exacts revenge, proving to be a warrior on the warpath who will annihilate any human being posing as an obstacle in his way.
It doesn’t exactly prove favourable to the men in black that he’s also a paranoid former security agent with an oblique past, a self-confessed ‘Preventor’ of bad things with skills in every facet of battle needed to offset the requirement of police intervention. Mills is a one-man wrecking crew whose single-mindedness reveals itself in a scarily proficient modus operandi when he gets access to the first clues.
Taken, co-written by famed director Luc Besson, is extremely violent, though there aren’t copious amounts of blood spilt, Mills using his fighting skills to compliment his almighty, expert aim with a gun. In contrast of course, not a single opponent has a clue how to handle weapons, their dozens of bullets miraculously spraying upward, sideward – somehow always managing to miss their intended target. He sustains a few nicks towards the end, suggesting that if he can bleed they surely could kill him in a theoretical sense - but it won't be happening in this film.
Perfectly compacted into 85 breakneck minutes, Taken sets out to provide a visceral wallop to its audience whilst remaining thoroughly entertaining down to its last bullet and the predictably sappy finale. Dispatching the bad guys will never trouble our conscience either, that part is easy: they’re uniformly repulsive, disgusting, unshaved, ultimately hapless foreigners who sit around playing cards whilst their beautiful prizes are drugged up and chained to unwashed beds, waiting for their next ‘client’ to ravage them and ease a little more of Albania’s foreign debt.
The further Mills delves into his daughter’s disappearance the higher up the corruption seems to have penetrated, and before his quest is over the stack of strewn bodies will be high enough to fill the ocean liner on which the climax is reached.
Taken is many things: efficient, absurd, brutal, kinetic, and deliriously generic - in short, thoroughly enjoyable mindless fare. With the imposing figure of Neeson cutting a swath through the best in scum and degradation that the Parisian underworld has to offer, I knew I was in good hands, his towering presence enough to intimidate any human being with a pathetic gun or knife in their bumbling hands.
I will undoubtedly watch this riveting film again some day, enjoying the idea of such a reputable actor standing in for a crusading force of nature. (Indeed, Oskar Schindler, Michael Collins and Rob Roy MacGregor would be proud). For now though, I just need a cleansing shower.
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