Taken

Movies can show us something new. They can take us to new worlds, raise fascinating questions, teach us things about ourselves, and create intelligent debate. Or, they can kick a little ass and take a few names. Not every movie needs to be about something serious. There is certainly a place for sedate dramas and drawing room comedies, but so too is there a place for high-quality mindless entertainment.

And thus we get the film Taken. The plot of this film is ludicrously simple. We have a man name Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) who spent a good portion of his career working as a fixer for the CIA. His former job, he tells his daughter (Maggie Grace), was to make sure that bad things didn’t happen. Kim, the daughter, is taking a trip to Paris, and Mills is not happy with this, since the 17-year-old Kim’s chaperone will be her 19-year-old friend. He has a number of rules for her when she gets to Paris, which she agrees to.

Of course, if nothing happened, we’d have no film. Kim and her friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) are marked the moment they get off the plane by a group of kidnappers. A man at the airport ingratiates himself to girls, finds out where they are staying, and sends in the bad guys. As it happens, Kim is on the phone with her father when the abduction happens, so he hears her being kidnapped. Naturally, considering his former profession, he’s on the next flight to Paris to track her down. And that’s pretty much the movie.

Oh, there’s more, certainly, but not much. The film takes pains in the first act to make sure that we in the audience fully understand the relationship between Bryan Mills and his daughter. Mills is divorced from his wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), who has remarried an extremely wealthy man. Because of this, Mills has lost touch with his daughter. In fact, he has retired from the CIA so that he can reconnect with his girl.

We’re spoon-fed this at the beginning of the film. His girl, he says, wants to be a singer, so for her birthday he buys her a karaoke machine. Her stepfather buys her a horse. Later, while having lunch with her (and finding out about the trip to Paris), he orders her what her favorite thing was as a child, and is shocked that she wants to go to Paris for the museums. See, he doesn’t realize that she has a fascination with art. He’s out of touch with her.

We’re also introduced to Bryan Mills being a badass when he takes a job with a few former–CIA friends to act as bodyguards for a Britney Spears-ish singer. When something goes wrong and the singer (Holly Valance) is attacked, Mills provides a quick beatdown and gets her out of the building. She is appreciative and gives Mills the name of her singing coach and manager, with the idea that if his daughter really wants to be a singer, she could do worse than having a very successful person backing her, the benefits, in this case, of being able to provide a quick beatdown.

Taken is slow through the first act, right up to the moment Kim and her friend are kidnapped. Of course, anyone watching this movie knows what is going to happen here, and fortunately, we don’t get a montage of Kim and Amanda walking around the Musée d'Orsay and Rue Madeleine. Instead, Amanda puts a song on the stereo in the girls’ apartment, and before the song is over, the two of them have been dragged off.

Perhaps the best-known part of the film is the speech Neeson offers just after the girl is dragged away. He says (with thanks to the quote section of IMDB.com), “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.” Since the kidnappers essentially tell him to piss off, the rest of the movie is him doing exactly that.

While there is a plot here, it‘s simplistic. Instead, Taken is essentially an excuse for Liam Neeson to find the next step on the ladder toward recovering his daughter, and then act in the most heartless, cruel, and determined way possible to learn where he has to go for the next. There’s a huge body count here, and nothing seems to slow Neeson down.

Admittedly, there are times when the character of Bryan Mills comes off as more like the Terminator than an actual human being. No matter the punishment he takes, he just keeps coming. At one point, when he is dragged out of a car and has his head smacked on the pavement, he gets up and takes a big dude out when the rest of us would be seeing stars and unable to stand up.

It doesn’t really matter, though. This isn’t necessarily supposed to be a believable film; instead, it is precisely what I said it is—an excuse to watch Liam Neeson cut a wide swath of pain, degradation, and death across Paris. He is without question one of the most coldblooded heroes ever created. John McClane and Batman could take lessons from him.

There are plot holes here, and there isn’t some sort of higher purpose here. This is as purely an action film as can be found. At several points, I actually couldn’t help but make exclamations. And hey, nobody gets anything they didn’t have coming.

Taken is a popcorn movie. It’s never going to be discussed with films like Citizen Kane or the collected works of Fellini, but boy damn howdy is it fun. It works despite the unreality of it because Bryan Mills acts the way we want our action heroes to act. He doesn’t play around, do a lot of talking, or much of anything but beat the snot out of people and then kill them. The reason this film works is because it allows its very stretching of reality to let its main character do exactly what we want him to do with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of action movie pleasure. Rent it, watch it, enjoy it.

Grade: A-