Movie Reviews

Movie Reviews: Taken

Liam Neeson may be in his mid-50s and best known for playing Oskar Schindler, but the guy definitely can kick some serious ass.

Neeson is unexpectedly but thoroughly credible as ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills in this terse but tough thriller from the writers of Léon: The Professional and the Transporter trilogy (Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen). Tired of Bryan's always-away-from-home exploits on behalf of "the company," wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) left him years ago, took their daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), and married a sickeningly wealthy businessman. On the eve of Kim's 17th birthday, a remorseful, retired, and far from rich Bryan has left behind his world-trotting ways and moved into a crappy apartment near his ex's Los Angeles mansion, hoping to make up for lost time by reconnecting with his kid.

Far from a suave James Bond type, Bryan is a sympathetically forlorn father without any female companionship, steady means of support, or apparent future prospects. A self-described "preventer," he proves his high-security skill set still is intact when former coworkers recruit him for a one-night gig guarding a pop star. Bryan coolly dispatches a knife-wielding attacker with believable all-part-of-the-job efficiency. He is powerless, however, when it comes to saying "no" to Kim. She needs his legal permission to spend part of her summer in Paris with a girlfriend. Bryan knows that's a terrible idea, safety-wise, but what's a desperate for affection dad to do?

All of this perfectly sets up Bryan's response to Kim's abduction by human traffickers. In a genuinely chilling scene, Kim is on her cell phone to Bryan when thugs invade the Paris apartment, grab the friend, and come looking for Kim. Hiding under a bed, Kim is told by Bryan to accept the fact that she will be found and taken, but that she should yell descriptions of the kidnappers for him to hear. After Kim is grabbed, one of the bad guys spots the phone. Bryan icily informs him that if Kim is not freed, "I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." He spends the rest of the movie doing exactly that: flying to Paris and getting background from a former contact who is now in French law enforcement. The main suspects are Albanian white-slavers with a reputation for ruthlessness. "Even the Russians give these guys a wide berth," Bryan is told.

Director Pierre Morel does an excellent job of ramping up the tension as Bryan races to find Kim before she can be spirited out of the country and become lost to him forever. Foot pursuits, car chases, police impersonation, beatings, shootings—Bryan does it all, in settings ranging from a seedy construction site bordello to a luxury yacht. Here's how dark the story gets: Bryan wires one baddie to a building's electrical supply to torture details from him. "You know," he tells his prisoner, "we used to outsource this kind of thing."

Most of the movie feels so relatively realistic for this genre (no futuristic high-tech nonsense, no sultry femme fatale, no cars crashing into helicopters) that it's easy to forgive some unlikely nick of time coincidences near the end. It's also nice to see that writers Besson and Kamen, whose last two Transporter scripts were disappointments, are back on track with such a suspenseful story and such an interesting lead character.

—James Dawson
01.29.09