At one point in Taken, when told by an old-friend-turned-cynical-police-chief that he’ll never find his daughter, Brian Mills (Liam Neeson) threatens that he will stop at nothing to save her, tearing down the Eiffel Tower if he has to. The line doesn’t make much sense, but Neeson sure sounds like a menacing action movie hero when he says it. That’s Taken in a nutshell: stupid and meaningless, but entertaining enough to satisfy an action junkie craving a fix amid this season of plodding Oscar dramas.
Brian is a retired CIA agent who desperately yearns to be closer to his estranged daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), who lives with Brian’s ex-wife and her wealthy husband. The first half-hour of the film focuses on Brian’s bumbling attempts to become closer to the girl. Neeson tries to speak with a belabored American accent, and his acting suffers as a result; Kim is supposed to be 17, so 25-year-old Grace inexplicably plays her like a spastic preteen.
Eventually, the overdrawn exposition ends, and Kim and her friend Amanda leave for Paris on vacation, much to the consternation of the ever-paranoid Brian. Evidently, Kim was never taught to be wary of strangers, and she and Amanda are soon kidnapped by Albanian sex traffickers. Brian then has 96 hours to find his daughter, or else he will never see her again. Brian then proceeds to tear the City of Lights to pieces as he tries to save Kim.
Needless to say, this is a film lacking in subtlety. In fact, Taken functions merely as an excuse for Liam Neeson to solve mysteries, drive fast cars, and beat up foreign villains. At times, the movie comes frustratingly close to tackling weighty issues: as Brian employs progressively harsher and bloodier tactics, one wonders if perhaps there’s a metaphor here about the pursuit of justice at all costs—but there isn’t. The characters are one-dimensional, the enemies are mostly nameless, racist caricatures, and Brian is presented throughout as the unquestioned force for Good.
The action scenes are slick, though, and thankfully comprise most of the second half of the film. An ex-boxer, Neeson more than pulls his weight, and one can’t help but think that he would have made a perfect James Bond in his younger days. The camera-work has the same dizzying, fast-paced quality of the Bourne movies, and Neeson’s seemingly impervious character is always coming up with new ways to kill off his enemies.
But sometimes Brian’s methods hit a little too close to home. At one point, the ex-CIA agent tortures a sex trafficker for information, electrocuting the tied-up Albanian in a dark basement. The scene was apparently toned down for its American release, but it still made me feel uneasy, especially in light of the CIA torture scandals of recent years. But if you’re thinking about modern politics while watching this film, you’re probably approaching it the wrong way. Taken is a movie about Liam Neeson killing lots and lots of people; it doesn’t pretend or attempt to be anything more.
