Taken

For a movie that tells you right up front in the previews that it's about a kidnapping, Taken takes an awfully long time to actually get to the kidnapping. For almost the first 30 minutes of the overall 93 of running time, we just get build-up of how the Liam Neeson character is this ex-Shady Ops badass who didn't get to spend much time with his daughter due to being overseas all the time doing Shady Ops stuff, and now she's turning 17 and about to be off to college so he's retired and moved to L.A. to be able to spend some more time with her.

Once it finally kicks into gear, Taken turns into about an hour of fairly solid revenge porn and Badass Cinema, marred mostly by just sloppy writing. The girl gets kidnapped by this Albanian gang in Paris that we learn has been at this for "six or seven years." And the day after she gets kidnapped we see the handsome young dude at the airport that acts as a lure is right back out there doing the exact same thing again, so you have to assume this is at least a full-time, 5-day-a-week operation they have running here. And then as the movie progresses we see they've got at least a few dozen white girls on hand chained up. Now the movie does explain that the Parisian police are aware of it but corrupt later on, but still man, that many pretty young white girls disappearing after arriving at the same spot? For years? Even if you hand-wave away the local police, you'd still figure this would be a massive media story. I mean, there's a show on CNN devoted to nothing BUT this sort of thing:



But nobody seems to notice or care, apparently Paris is so nonchalant about gangs of thugs in ski masks kicking in doors in upscale neighborhoods and toting kicking and screaming girls out to waiting vans that the neighbors don't even lift an eyebrow. C'est la vie!

The implausible ridiculousness just piles up and it's not worth recounting every little detail, but it's mostly offset by the novelty of Liam Neeson playing a badass in a lowbrow movie like this and doing a pretty good job of it. The only other thing I want to comment on is the whole "Lustful Turk" aspect of the main villains being Albanians selling white women to Arab Shieks. Ok, there's a real sex trade that actually does this, albeit with a whole lot less efficiency than what's depicted here. It seemed like a little much though, when the final bodyguard dude pulls out this ridiculously curved folding knife to fight with, and then the fat robed Sultan guy pulls out his own curved dagger. I'm not gonna get into the whole racial aspect, frankly I don't care. But this isn't typical Luc Besson semi-comedic action, this is supposed to be a very Serious and Intense Thriller, and for the climactic scene to elicit laughter just based on how clumsily stereotypical and reactionary it is kinda ends everything on a wrong note.