REVIEW: Taken

STARRING: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen View Trailer RELEASE DATE: 01/30/09 DATE SCREENED: 01/26/09 The Verdict GREAT - See it opening weekend

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you … and I will kill you”. I was sold on Taken the moment those words were uttered in the trailer. The warning, delivered brilliantly by Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, goes unheeded by the Albanian sex traffickers who have kidnapped Bryan’s daughter while on a trip to Paris. They simply wish him "Good Luck". Big mistake...

What the bad guys don’t know is that Bryan is some kind of government operative that “prevents bad things from happening”. Early in the film we see that he is recently retired and desperately trying to rebuild a relationship with his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), whose mother Lenore (Famke Janssen) has married a very rich businessman who is footing the bill for Kim to follow the band U2 on their European tour. Nervous about his teenaged daughter traveling through Europe with another teenaged friend, Bryan gives her a special phone with orders to call every day. Luckily, she calls him just as the bad guys arrive to kidnap the two teens, leading to the classic lines in the trailer and leaving him with small clues as to who the kidnappers are. Bryan is on the first plane to Paris, and it seems that “preventing bad things from happening” must involve a lot of killing. Simply put, the Albanians have kidnapped the wrong girl, and now they have to pay for it. Bryan only has a few days to find his daughter, and he quickly goes about dispatching the bad guys as he works his way through the underworld of sex trafficking. Leaving a trail of dead bodies in the red light districts of Paris, nothing is going to stop Bryan from rescuing his daughter.

Any fan of “24” will recognize this story as a variation on the first season of that series. I personally think “24” was the best drama in TV history through season 5, and it was all set in motion by watching Jack Bauer leave a trail of bodies on his way to saving his kidnapped wife and daughter. Taken is much more violent than any TV show, and Neeson puts all of his movie fight training to good use in some of the best, kick-ass, non-CGI, action scenes I’ve seen out of a non-Asian film in years (the film is from France). The film is actually a throwback to the great Arnold Schwarzenegger/Sylvester Stallone action movies of the ‘80s. To my surprise, Liam Neeson has that same action star charisma. Even though you know what is going to happen, Taken manages to push all the right buttons and get you rooting for Bryan even when he has to torture someone to get closer to his daughter’s location. Jason Statham is constantly being pushed down our throats as a big action star, while it turns out that Neesan is a better action hero. Taken is better than any movie Statham has done. If you like action films, this is a great one worth seeing opening weekend.