Taken

Who's Your Daddy?



In Taken, Liam Neeson gives you a former superspy who now faces very mundane issues. These are common, nevertheless quite warm and quite pressing questions like coming up with the right birthday present for her late adolescent daughter.

The superspy's family is split by the time we join in, Neeson's figure gets thoroughly embarrassed when the stepfather delivers his very robust and very alive gift to the girl. Now shame on you if you got the wrong idea.

The daughter shortly will approach his father with a request to let her leave the country for a while. Though Neeson is hesitant at first, - this is everyday average superspy functionality, a so called: "Factory Default" - he finally agrees. Her daughter shortly will be Taken - hence the title, I suspect scientifically - by remarkably bad Albanian people, but Neeson gets enough information from his daughter in those very crucial moments to start his own crusade for the beloved kidnapped.


Liam Neeson looks and feels highly credible in this acceptable spy flick, though it is more precise to regard the installment as an average action film with a lot of similar fights and a lot of similar facial expressions in it. Perplexedly, the spy characteristics of the film come from nowhere except Neeson's raw elegance and consorting charisma, if the movie would lack his presence, then the results surely would be remarkably shallow and utterly predictable. Though the case remains similar nevertheless, Taken at least tries to look for openings to make the narrative more interesting, and even manages to find some extra moments of bitterly sought novelty shocks along the way.



The main problem with Taken is - if this is a problem at all - that it satisfies happily with the uninventive action directions concerning flashy car chases and profound strikes to the face performed by skillful hands and bathroom sinks in rapid succession. Thank God it is not the same face all the time. One might seem to molest the depths of an amazingly deep ineptitude if to blame an action flick for delivering action.

The drawback of this style of narrative though is that you know you are free to steal a glance at your watch, - if you do have one, I never had - because Liam will kick all hostile butts and will have the woman in the end, too. OK, will have his daughter. From this point on, it is the redefinition of action is the least I would anticipate from such a classic recipe, but that, Taken does not deliver.



- Hey, it's SHANNON from LOST! You may want to reconsider saving her ass.
- Oh My God! YOU ARE SO RIGHT!!

At the end of the day, this film behaves more predictably as it approaches its own focal points in the narrative, but this is - sadly - normal behavior from present day action flicks. Initially, Taken is a film of solid acting and sane conflicts - from a narrative point of view - between its characters, but quickly will unfold to Luc Besson style car chase action, once the central conflict is introduced. I wouldn't call it a bad movie, though. I would call it a movie which Liam Neeson skillfully saves from being bad.



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