Taken

Taken This is a new release from so many production companies I couldn’t keep track. It stars Liam Neeson, as a divorced father, and retired CIA agent. He quit his job and moved to California to try and repair his relationship with his 17-year old daughter, who lives with her mother and wealthy step-father.
It starts out in a very normal, down to earth and believable way, dad screwing up a present at the B-day party, his friends from the Agency coming over for old times’ sake, trying to talk him into coming back to the fold. Very normal stuff.
Then the daughter wants to go to Paris for the summer with a friend. Dad balks, mom (Famke Jansen) insists—she will be with a nice family, etc., Dad relents against his better judgment. She is too young. At the airport he discovers the true itinerary—the girls plan to follow U-2 on their European tour. He wants to call it off, citing the dangers of traveling in Europe alone, especially for two young females, but mom gets angry and tell him that all the kids do it. (Right, all the kids with rich parents maybe.)
Cut to the chase: The girls haven’t even unpacked when three men enter the apartment where they are staying—alone it turns out—and kidnap them. Neeson’s daughter is on the phone when it happens and manages to let her father know. When they grab her she drops the phone. Someone picks it up—and he can hear them breathing. He then delivers the lines that sucked me right into the movie in the trailer:
“I don’t know who you are, or what you want. If you want money, I can tell you I have no money. But what I do have, are a very particular set of skills developed over a long career, that make me a nightmare for someone like you. If you let her go now, I will walk away. But if you don’t I will hunt you, and find you and kill you.” Or something like that.
So begins the best action thriller since The Bourne Identity. This one may even be better. Neeson is everyman, a dad, a friend, an ex-husband. But he is trained for just such a situation as has happened to his daughter.
From the moment he hits ground in Paris, he is an unstoppable force, relentless, ruthless, without regard to the law, to pain, to loyalty, old friendships, or whatever code might exist in the trade. He is a consummate professional, never losing his cool, treating the job like an exercise, albeit on a heightened level due to its time-sensitive nature. If he doesn’t find her in 96 hours, he likely never will. He is up against a ruthless mafia-style gang of Albanians who have infiltrated France and deal in prostitution—stealing, addicting and selling women, or pimping them out on the streets.
Neeson is the anti-James Bond. There is no style, no flash, no cool. He plies his craft with robotic efficiency and emotionless intensity. He dispatches the men in his way as quickly as possible—there are no protracted, Hollywood fist-fights in this one. He hasn’t the time. And Hollywood’s version is not how it’s really done. The violence is as calculated as his mind is trained—and there is a lot of it. He must disable or kill at least 30 people—“but they were all bad”, to quote Arnold in True Lies—and dispatch is the word. No one is ever hit in the face. Groin, knee, throat, so fast you have to be watching to see it. He gives no one a second chance. He asks once, then the pain begins. He is an irresistible force, unlike anything these thugs have ever seen. All he wants is his daughter back, and he is willing, and capable of, plowing through the entire Paris underworld to get her. Everything he does, he does with a reason in mind. Even the stuff that seems to be too much, or over the top. I found myself agreeing with each move, whispering to Nita, “that’s right, that’s what he would do in reality”.
The level of tension is consistently high. The intensity is palpable. The depiction of the depraved world of flesh-peddling is realistic and sadistic, but the director never, to my mind, crosses the line into the preposterous, or gratuitous. There is a bit of skin, but only skimpy outfits as the girls are on display for auction bidding. The only profanity is one “Merde!”
But it is not simply a high-action movie. The director wanted more, and gives it to us. It is visceral, real, hard-nosed and imbued with the emotion we all share of a parent trying to protect a child. Neeson is spectacular in his understated portrayal of an authentic person who happens to have been a spook-chaser.
In the beginning of the movie, there is a believable, brief, set-up that gives us the glimpse we need as to how skilled Neeson’s character is. The movie ends back at that place with the resultant favor someone like Neeson’s character curries over years of network-building. It ends on just the right note.
Nita had about three little heart attacks during the movie, and nearly broke my wrist once or twice, which is a sure sign she liked it. By the time we got home she still hadn’t caught her breath sufficiently to give me a verbal thumbs-up, but I feel safe in saying she was glad to have seen it, despite the disturbing moments and almost dying of heart failure. I loved it. The two hours felt like twenty minutes.