Taken Review

"Taken" is "24" meets "The Bourne Identity". It stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, a retired American spy whose daughter Kim (Maggie Grace from "Lost") is kidnapped in Paris while he's on the phone to her from Los Angeles. The kidnappers come on the line and Mills tries to warn them what they're letting themselves in for:

"I don't know who you are. If you're looking for ransom, I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills acquired over a very long career in the shadows, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you. And I will kill you."

But do they listen? Do they merde!

It's impossible to fault "Taken" on its own terms. Production comes courtesy of action president Luc Besson, who hires "District 13" director Pierre Morel to bring his particular style of high impact martial arts and close range gunplay to the film. The movie is mercilessly violent, but at the same time no nonsense as Bryan knows that in kidnapping cases such as his daughter's, it's typically only 96 hours until the victim is sold into prostitution. Alone in a foreign city with the clock ticking, violence is the only course of action left open to him.

There's some nice characterisation early on when the audience gets to see Bryan wrapping a birthday present for Kim in a borderline obsessive-compulsive manner. This attention to detail makes it hard for Bryan to interact on a normal level with people in LA, but in Paris it's what allows him to pick up his daughter's trail when the kidnappers have seemingly left no clues. In contrast, the film is populated by Besson's trademark ugly extras as bad guys who are lucky to get a line of dialogue, let alone any character development, before getting blown away.

Neeson has already shown as Henry Duchart / Ras Al-Ghoul in "Batman Begins" that he can look good performing martial arts. Here he out-Bauers Bauer and just about equals Bourne. In terms of the genre, "Taken" is doing nothing new, but it's a must for fans of Besson movies such as "Kiss of the Dragon" and "The Transporter".