Taken
Pierre Morel

The story: Retired CIA agent Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) wants to reconnect with his 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) but finds it hard to compete with her rich and generous stepfather.
When she is abducted on a trip to Paris, Mills hunts down those responsible and rescues her.


This is the big screen knock-off of the popular TV series 24. Instead of 24 hours, it is 96. Instead of terrorists, there are Eastern European human traffickers as the scumbags. Instead of Kiefer Sutherland as superagent Jack Bauer, you get Liam Neeson as superdad and superagent Bryan Mills.
Given the similarities, Taken has enjoyed an impressive run at the American box office. It opened at No. 1 and has shown strong legs by remaining in the top three for five weeks. The sleeper hit, directed by Pierre Morel, has grossed US$140 million (S$211 million) to date.
But unlike each season of 24 which always begins with a bang, Taken starts somewhat slowly.
The film first establishes the prickly state of relations between Mills and his ex-wife Lenore (X-Men’s Famke Janssen) as well as the tenuous connection between him and his daughter Kim (coincidentally the name of Bauer’s daughter in 24).
Having been an absent father to Kim (an oddly unrecognisable Maggie Grace from sci-fi drama Lost) while she was growing up, Mills now has to compete with her stepfather for her affection.
But when she and her girlfriend Amanda are abducted in Paris, Mills’ skills as a CIA agent prove vital in tracking down his daughter. He will stop at nothing to save her and woe betide anyone who gets in his way.
The prolific Neeson has taken on roles ranging from the Oscar-nominated Oskar Schindler in the Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993) to Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) and can generally be counted on to deliver solid performances.
While the stoic and single-minded Mills is not much of a challenge character-wise, the film makes good use of Neeson’s imposing 1.93m frame as he despatches baddies in smooth-flowing, hypnotic action sequences in small enclosed spaces.
The well-choreographed fight scenes are stylishly filmed but they do not quite reach the heights of aesthetic grace served up in Quantum Of Solace (2008).
Neeson barely breaks a sweat moving from interrogation to unarmed combat to shooting sprees. And the film is so keen to keep up this unrelenting pace that it does not pause to ask about the morality of the violence and torture Mills is inflicting.
What Taken, produced and written by French film-maker Luc Besson, does to alleviate any niggling of the conscience is to give us one-dimensional villains who, clearly, deserve their fates.
The worst of the lot is a suit-clad creep for whom human trafficking is merely business and not personal. Mills snarls: “It was all personal to me”, kills him and then pumps a few more rounds into his body to vent his hatred and disgust.
On the big screen and small, vigilante justice rules.
(ST)