For all its misguided, bullheaded gusto, Taken has enough promising loose seams to almost qualify as an interesting mess. That’s hardly an accomplishment, but at a time of year when quality is tough to find at most movie theaters, a missed opportunity is better than nothing at all.
Instead of a hilariously awful and ultimately dull action dud – you know you’re in trouble with zingers like, “I will tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to” – the Luc Besson-penned action flick could have settled on one of its two sorely ignored subtexts: a satire on American vigilante justice (Obama or not, it’s still timely) or a riff on a father’s fear of his daughter’s sexuality.
Besson (best known for writing and directing The Professional and The Fifth Element) has long since expired in cinematic relevance in France or the United States. Along with co-writer Robert Mark Kamen (Transporter 2), the French filmmaker never capitalizes on the constant flow of absurdity in the script.
After so many dead bodies thud against the floor (quite a few for a PG-13 rating), all you can really do is sit back and chuckle.
The plot is simple and falls just short of being oh-so-bad-it’s-good. Against better judgment, retired government agent Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, slipping in and out of his native Irish accent) allows his teenage daughter, Kim, (Maggie Grace, The Jane Austen Book Club) to travel around Paris with a friend.
Within hours of her arrival, Kim and her friend are abducted by a violent gang of men in black. Mills is on the phone when it happens, and his professional composure just can’t be taken seriously. Once he sends the “data” to a friend in his old line of work, we learn in a matter of minutes the girls have been abducted by Albanian sex traffickers.
The real fun begins once Mills arrives in Paris, leaving a body count in his path which must tally somewhere around 30 (mysteriously, it never catches up to him). If the film had been authored solely by Americans, Taken would be easy enough to dismiss as the sort of globe-trotting vendetta schlock we see all too frequently on the big screen. But the foreign perspective forces us to consider Mills’ actions from the outside.
Ultimately, it is the French authorities who prove corrupt and treacherous, and the American vigilante – a poorly drawn descendant of Ethan Edwards of The Searchers – whose actions are always 100 percent defensible. Mills can murder one man after another without any pause for morality. He even slows down long enough to enjoy torturing one particularly unlucky individual in a rigged-up electric chair.
Oh, what Daddy will do for his little girl! And it’s in the unexplored father-daughter relationship that the tactless director Pierre Morel (Banlieue 13) and his screenwriting team really strike out.
Shortly after we first meet Kim at her 17th birthday party, the rich step-father (Xander Berkeley, Seraphim Falls) outdoes the father by presenting her with a brand new horse (an established Freudian symbol for sexuality, for those keeping score at home), which she then proceeds to ride in professed joy, much to her father’s dismay.
Taken never really confronts the depths of Mills’ urgency to rescue his daughter, only caring to mention late in the game that Kim is a virgin. After all the car chases and fisticuffs – Morel’s action sequences actually manage to slow the film – he finds her in the captivity of a relatively classier establishment, virginity still presumably intact, and his resolve to rescue her becomes even more dire.
It’s too much to ignore, but somehow, the filmmakers manage to turn on the only worthwhile seeds they planted.
Neeson’s stilted performance doesn’t reach past the face-value construct of a rampaging, ex-government spy. He is the super dad: a murdering machine with both the destructive capabilities and emotional range roughly equivalent to those of The Terminator.
As the appropriately terrified daughter, Grace does slightly better, albeit with a fraction of the screen time. Famke Janssen (The Wackness) is briefly bitchy as the woman who left Mills back in his active work days.
To be fair though, Taken is not really an actor’s piece. This time around, they just let the stunt doubles shine.
zherrm@gmail.com
RATING: 1.5 out of 5 stars
