Liam Neeson, who plays Taken’s knocker-outer, has a daughter who jets off to Europe to follow U2 on tour. Three minutes in Paris and she’s kidnapped to be sold on the black market as an unspoiled American teenager — they fetch a high price apparently. During the abduction she’s able to phone daddy, an ex-CIA operative named Bryan Mills, who gets some important clues from the hectic phone call. The movie provides us the villains’ names, although I’m sure it was fudging a little because the clues weren’t that specific.
Mills feeds off the Jack Bauer/Jason Statham adrenaline rush that most action movies are plugging into these days. That’s not a complaint, just an observation. In fact, the short attention span feeds into Taken rather smoothly — it’s a movie that is best not left to dawdle. It helps that Neeson, a gifted actor, can play the maniacal father with a deep-seated rage that makes his avenging angel terrifying and also cathartic. In one sequence he massacres an entire house of teen smugglers, a scene that in another movie would have seemed cruel and vicious — in Taken it feels necessary. Mostly, though, Mills just knocks people out on his daughter’s zig-zagging trail into the underworld of human smuggling; after all, Taken’s PG-13. The same film with an R rating would be kinda interesting.
Taken, which moves fast enough to feel like a cardio routine, paints Paris worse than most movies paint Tijuana or Fallujah. Paris apparently is the scum-bag capital of the entire northern hemisphere: hunky spotters stalk the airports, dirty cops lead the police force, and coked-out prostitutes are chained to every radiator in Paris. They’re also in the break room at a 24-hour construction site, where foreigners toil through the night producing mud pits, showers of sparks and fire drums that people can warm their hands over — the perfect setting for an action scene. And these aren’t just prostitutes: they’re kidnapped tourists, often Americans like Mills’ daughter, who’s played by Maggie Grace (Lost), a 25-year-old actress who conveys a 17-year-old by running everywhere giggling and/or sobbing.
Taken is not the smartest thriller made, nor is it the most comprehensible, but it makes up for its failures with pure neck-snapping adrenaline. So much so that it should come with a chiropractor.
