Before I get into it, I’ll say one thing: Taken is not a good movie. It’s mightily entertaining, yes, and its balls are dangerously large and frighteningly hairy. But a good movie Taken is not. The plot is passable if inconsequential: the goal is clearly to show Liam Neeson grumbling around, breaking arms and getting innocent women killed and not to deliver a powerful narrative.
The basic story is a simple one: Neeson is a badass, someone kidnapped his daughter, he’s going to get her back. There’s a bunch of shit that happens surrounding the film that are billed as circumstantial. They don’t matter. Neeson’s some sort of ambiguous spy-divorcee, he wants to be close to his daughter, as soon as he starts to get there she goes on vacation and is promptly kidnapped. But these elements are all horribly implemented and highly irrelevant. As an example, the sole reason for his daughter’s vacation was that she decided to follow U2 on a tour across Europe. This tells us one of two things: the producers are grossly out of touch or, more than likely, the plot was a complete after-thought. A testament to the story’s irrelevance is that I watched the movie without subtitles. Though I understood the French scenes, the Albanian ones went over my head. And it absolutely did not matter. I knew what was going on because it was violently obvious, so obvious the close captioning could have been in caveman speak and it would have held the same bearing on the viewer (Neeson mad. Albanian want to hurt Neeson. Neeson say he would find Albanian and kill. Grumble).
Watching the film makes me want to ask you, the reader (hi mom!) one simple question. What do Dana Carvey, Liam Neeson and Larry Bird have in common. Watch about ten minutes of Taken and you’ll have your answer: they all look like middle aged Lesbians. I don’t know if it was the make-up or just the vigors of life, but Neeson looked rough. Of course it didn’t matter because after the film’s introductory preface (about 25 minutes of mumbling and whining) Neeson’s kid is napped and he gets to work. What ensues is every man’s dream: a film tailor made for Jason Statham starring not-Jason Statham. It’s an adrenaline rush devoid of Statham’s smug, convoluted accent. Unlike Statham, Neeson is both an accomplished actor and a badass, and watching Schindler kill upwards of a hundred Albanian’s takes precedence over Statham’s unintelligible mumbling any day of the week.
Taken isn’t a film that lends itself to in-depth analyses so I’m going to stop it here: Taken is 90 minutes of power. The DVD should come with a beard-comb and moustache wax, because this as manly as Manowar and only half as homo-erotic (there was one blade-wielding villain inexplicably drenched in guy-liner).
