Taken (2008)
Directed by Pierre Morel
Bryan Mills, a former government operative, is trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter Kim. After reluctantly agreeing with his ex-wife to let Kim go to Paris on vacation with a friend, his worst nightmare comes true. While on the phone with his daughter shortly after she arrives in Paris, she and her friend are abducted by a gang of human traffickers. Working against the clock, Bryan relies on his extensive training and skills to track down the ruthless gang that abducted her and launch a one-man war to rescue his daughter.
24 connections found
View:
24 films that influenced Taken
What critics say influenced Taken
Moving from the theme of vigilante dad ( Death Wish) , to the strategies of slave traders who traffic girls into prostitution on Internet auctions ( Trade ), to the tragic spectacle of a scrupulous outsider who slides down the sinkhole of an alternate underworld universe of crime, decadence and perversion (Paul Schrader’s Hardcore ), this hack job has not a shred of originality.
In the propulsively outlandish thriller Taken (it's like Paul Schrader's 1979 Hardcore with no brain and more muscle), Liam Neeson plays a retired CIA agent out to find his daughter, who has been abducted by an Albanian sex trafficker.
Neeson's readiness for worst-case scenariosand screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen's proficiency in queuing them upfuels the high-octane lunacy of Taken, which is a little like Paul Schrader's Hardcore retooled as a Steven Seagal vehicle.
Take the Parisian American kidnapping plot of Roman Polanski's "Frantic" and cross with the father-spiralling-into-the repulsive-world-of-the-porn-industry of Paul Schrader's "Hardcore" then add a dash of "Bodyguard" and Luc Besson's penchant for carrying things way over the top and you've got "Taken," a film that impresses if for nothing else but the way it compelling turns the fifty-six Liam Neeson into an action star.
Take the Parisian American kidnapping plot of Roman Polanski's "Frantic" and cross with the father-spiralling-into-the repulsive-world-of-the-porn-industry of Paul Schrader's "Hardcore" then add a dash of "Bodyguard" and Luc Besson's penchant for carrying things way over the top and you've got "Taken," a film that impresses if for nothing else but the way it compelling turns the fifty-six Liam Neeson into an action star.
Something like Frantic , in fact, the 1988 movie in which Ford's character rousts Paris in search of his kidnapped wife.
A trenchcoated Robert Mitchum, for instance, sauntered through the villainous Europe of “Foreign Intrigue” (1956), but his saunter is pretty much all that remains; the rest of the movie was forgettable to start with.
In her we can see a bit of Sandrine Bonnaire's defiant female drifter in Agnès Varda's Vagabond, as well as the passive, inward-bending body language of the young "models" in Robert Bresson's later films, weakly struggling against their fate.
Advertisement
Owing its existence to a revenge genre of vigilante justice that morphed from Westerns to urban retribution stories, notably in 1974 when Charles Bronson took the law into his own hands in Michael Winner's "Death Wish," "Taken" is quick to send the hero on a body count mission.
Wendy's weary road trip takes a few of the same turns we've witnessed in, say, Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven or any number of American hard-luck screen stories of life on the road.
Taken is basically a modern western in that sense - just like John Ford's 1956 classic The Searchers, in which a man's niece is kidnapped by Comanches; he tracks them until he catches up and then starts killing them.
Despite its grim emphasis, Taken is not without humor; I particularly enjoyed Bryans visit to an old colleague turned Paris police desk jockey, whose oblivious wife serves dinner to the two mutually wary men the way she chirps Carrots? to the brooding Neeson is the funniest offer of food in a movie since Marlon Brando proffered biscuits in The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Advertisement
From Mary Rowlandson to Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in The Searchers to Jake VanDorn (George C. Scott) in Hardcore (Paul Schrader’s even creepier version of the story he wrote for Taxi Driver), white American men have gone forth to recover nieces and wives and daughters who have been disappeared into prostitution and sexual slavery.
Pierre Morel follows his rousing directorial debut, District B13 (2004), with this disposable thriller about a retired American agent in covert operations (Liam Neeson) who goes back into action when sex-slave traffickers in Paris kidnap his teenage daughter (Maggie Grace of the ABC series Lost).