Taken (2009)

Just once I would like to see a fight scene in a spy thriller with shots that last more than a quarter of a second. Seriously, what happened to fight choreography? There used to be an art in scenes like this, now it seems filmmakers throw together a hodgepodge of footage of God-knows-what and speed it up to about a hundred times as fast as it was originally filmed so the audience can't tell what they're looking at. Audiences seem to spend a lot of money on these movies, though, so I guess nobody's complaining but me.

From the above paragraph, you'd probably assume I disliked Taken, but that's not the case at all. It's actually a quite entertaining action movie, like a Bourne film for family men. The complaint about the action sequences is one of the only huge problems I have with the film. While I wouldn't exactly call it art (and it's really not as good as the Bourne movies, either), I would have no reservation saying that it held my interest throughout and that you should see it. If you've run out of Scorsese, Hitchcock and Bergman titles, that is.

You know you have a good shot of a a film of this type being worthwhile when the filmmakers cast respectable actors in lead roles (unlike, say, Paul Walker), and you can't get much more respectable than Mr. Liam Neeson. His badass-ness is the best reason to watch Taken. He plays Bryan Mills, a former CIA agent whose seventeen-year-old daughter is taken (hence the clever title) while she is visiting France by a group of criminals (I won't tell you their nationality lest you begin to subconsciously stereotype) who specialize in sex trafficking.

Mills then goes on a quest to find his daughter. All logic is now cast aside, for the remainder of the film. If you can buy into this, I guarantee you'll be entertained, but that will have to be one hell of a suspension-of-disbelief.

The plot becomes completely implausible, his methods of finding these criminals completely preposterous. In his review of Taken, Roger Ebert writes, "if CIA agents in general were as skilled as Bryan Mills in particular, Osama bin Laden would have been an American prisoner since late September 2001." The point is, we know there is absolutely no way any man would be able to pull off all this impossible spy crap. But Neeson sells it so effectively that we cheer him on anyway. Mills is merciless and unrelenting in his search for his daughter, and it actually comes off as kind of touching as opposed to completely laughable.

One more thing I'd like to point out is that some of the film's subject matter is very real indeed. Global sex trafficking is a tragedy that occurs every day, and it is sad and sickening. I don't want to make any judgment calls on this movie, but I can only hope it serves as an eye-opener to this disturbing issue and not as a sensationalizer and exploiter of it.