Taken is an action/thriller starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Holly Valance, Katie Cassidy, Olivier Rabourdin, Arban Bajraktaraj, Nicholas Giraud, and Xander Berkeley. You know the speech, it's a meme.
Former CIA agent Bryan Mills (Neeson) has retired from service to be near his teenage daughter Kimmy (Grace), but is having trouble competing with his ex-wife's (Janssen) rich new husband Stuart (Berkeley) who can afford to do things like buy her a whole-ass horse. He does manage to get her an in with a pop diva (Valance) when he saves her from a stalker while working security, but that plot point doesn't really go anywhere except making a nice capstone at the end of the movie, which it definitely needed (but we'll get to that).
Anyway, Kimmy and her friend Amanda (Cassidy) go to Paris with Bryan's reluctant blessing and are almost immediately kidnapped to be hooked on heroin and sold into sex slavery. Bryan happens to be on the phone with Kimmy when the bad guys come to get them, and delivers the iconic "I will find you. And I will kill you." speech. He then proceeds to do exactly that - uses his friends and contacts to narrow down what happened to her, gets over to France and starts systematically hunting down the fuckers responsible until he eventually nearly catches up with her...just as she's sold to a sheikh (Nabil Massad), so he kills that dude and his whole security force! And then we get the nice little capstone where he introduces Kimmy to the pop star (she's an aspiring singer).
So, I want to say up front that I enjoy this movie. It's a fun action thriller, and it catapulted Neeson into being an action hero with a very particular set of skills. But it also always felt cathartic, and I went into it this time thinking about that. There's a feeling, I think, when Neeson delivers the speech, that we as the audience are meant to understand that Bryan Mills is going to find his daughter. It's a race against time, but he's going to do it, and he's going to kill all these evil bad guys. The catharsis is that every father believes that, in a similar situation, he would do everything it takes to protect his kids. And that's fine, I'm a dad, I know that feeling.
But...there's also a weird "I wish a motherfucker would" feeling about it. The best thing I can liken it to is in Pulp Fiction where Vincent is talking about his car being keyed, and wishing he could have caught the vandal in the act. "It would have been worth him doing it just I could have caught him doing it." I don't think Neeson's character feels that way - he's all business and never once tells anyone "I told you so" (though you get the feeling he kinda wants to with his ex). I think the audience is meant to have that feeling, and if the movie took itself a little more seriously it would examine that a little, that brutal, paternal instinct not just to protect but to avenge, but the problem is you can't avenge without being wronged.
That's one thing. The other thing, and this is something I've thought of before but I really paid attention to this time, is that Bryan doesn't not give one single shit about anyone except Kimmy. He starts kicking in doors (well, curtains) where a lot of other girls are being raped and drugged, and never does a single thing to help any of them except the one that is wearing Kimmy's jacket. He finds her friend Amanda dead, handcuffed to a bed, and reacts, but he never tells anyone, never contacts her family, never contacts the police or the American consulate, hell, we never even see Kimmy reacting because she's never told (on camera). The sheikh buys three girls at the auction, all of them are hustled into his rooms before Bryan bursts in and shoots him, but we never see the other two girls again. What conclusion are we meant to draw there?
If we're being charitable, we could draw the conclusion that Bryan is realistic enough to know that he's never going to solve this problem or free all these girls, and that the best he can do is get Kimmy back. But I think there's a more obvious (and somewhat darker) conclusion: Those other girls brought it on themselves. Kimmy is a virgin (the movie makes sure we know that, it's mentioned twice, once while she's being auction off to shadowy men and she's actually referred to as "pure"), while Amanda is openly sexual and outright says she's going to fuck the guy that they shared a cab with (Giraud), who it turns out was a spotter for the sex trafficking organization. We don't know a thing about the other girls we see, but the couple that we do hear have Eastern European accents, and while that's a subtle thing, that tells us that they are not "western girls on vacation" who got kidnapped, but more likely girls from poorer European countries who agreed to come out here (under false pretenses, but still agreed).
So at the guts of it, this is kind of a morality play or cautionary tale - if you're pure enough, maybe you'll have an avenging angel in the form of your father swoop in and visit bloody vengeance on your attackers. If not...well, sorry, Amanda.
My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Medium-high
Next up: Last Night in Soho
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