"Taken"

This film starring Liam Neeson is not the type usually eyed here, the action thriller violence type. It did not seem to have an especially long run in theaters and, while I haven't read any reviews, I doubt if it was reviewed especially well. Directed and written respectively by a French team, Pierre Morel and Luc Besson, and set partially in Paris, it's the tale of an ex-CIA "preventer" living in L.A. who goes into trained rescue mode when his 17 year old daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers in Paris.

Since anyone who had seen the trailer, which was widely aired in television adverts, knew what was to come, the fairly lame opening set-up worked because we knew what it was up to. As the plot evolved the film began to click, the Parisian search had an air of authenticity, and then the mayhem began.

The film did not strain for political correctness or sensitivity, at all. It was a reminder of 1974's "Death Wish", a classic of this genre that remade Charles Bronson's career. That film opened two months after yours truly experienced a fairly rough and terrifying mugging on a visit to New York, and I fully understood the huge success of that film, in fact I enjoyed it despite thinking that it was blatantly crude. Neesem's character in "Taken" is unforgiving in his at all costs search and destroy mission. He's like a Bruce Lee in his B movie days who annihilates everyone in his path, no matter how many and how unlikely. No effort is made to balance ethnic issues. The Albanians are all heinous and despicable gang members played by actors whose facial appearances, snarls, and brutality would never be mistaken for good people. So we don't find a sympathetic Albanian here who is the good informer or some such thing. The end buyer of the best girls as the film rushes to its climax is an aging and overweight Arab sheik on his luxury Seine River cruising yacht. No good Arabs either, just rich procurors, protectors, and users. It's an unusual approach for today's movie market, but what's wrong with it. In the context of the film it's the only approach that could work. While these ethnic groups are of course not all cut from the same cloth, Albanian gangs are well known as particularly ugly and in New York today it's written that as they've gained critical mass they're even worse than the Russians or the Fukien Chinese. Arabs broadly have a gracious culture when not seen at its extremes, but anyone who has been around the block in London has seen the crude and arrogant behavior of many hugely wealthy Saudi or other royal family low life who make Dodi Fayed look like a Boy Scout. These folks are around and "Taken" did not bother to dilute that fact.

After killing at least 30 or 40 villians and being the general cause of a new wrecked car lot on a few acres in Paris, the next and final scene shows Neeson's almost unscathed man arriving back at LAX with his smiling relaxed rescued daughter, looking as if they have actually been on a vacation in Paris. No accountability, nothing post-traumatic, on to the promising next phase of their lives.

All that said, I enjoyed it. No one could have carried the film like Neeson, there were some scenes that were perfectly set-up and filmed, and it was nice to see something straightforward, despite being completely improbable.