Results

“I don’t know who you are.  I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career.  Skills that make me a nightmare for peope like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don’t… I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you.”

The advertisements for Taken sell a very simple, yet effective hook: a man’s teenage daughter is kidnapped while on vacation in Paris. Her father, unfortunately for the kidnappers,  happens to be a secret agent with a “very particular set of skills,” and promises to hunt the culprits down. “Good luck,” comes the reply, and just like that, the hunt is on.

Many contemporary action movies would fail to deliver on this simple premise, instead bloating the storyline with a lot of useless subplots or heavy-handed moralizing. Taken gives in to no such temptations:  it goes straight for the jugular and hangs there, like a pit bull, until the ride is over.

The beauty  of Taken is that there’s fairly little more to say. Brian Mills (Liam Neeson) is an ex-agent in “retirement,” obsessing over his daughter’s safety and squabbling with his estranged wife (a woefully underused Famke Janssen). When his daughter is abducted  by a French white slavery ring, Mills puts his surveillance and intelligence-gathering skills to work,  mercilessly tracking down the kidnappers one step at a time and blowing through a series of high-velocity action pieces, daring bluffs, and chilling interrogation scenes.

Taken spends no time on intricate motivations, self-doubt, or meditations on violence. Neeson trades introspection for good old-fashioned throat-punching, calling to mind the stripped-down detective thrillers of the Eighties, which often featured a lone protagonist (perhaps Charles Bronson) mowing his way through hordes of baddies so universally doomed, you nearly feel a pang of sympathy for them.

All this is not to say that the film lacks tension. Several of Mills’ leads dead-end, forcing him to find another route to his daughter’s kidnappers, and a helpful contact turns out to be more than he seems. The script, co-penned by Transporter and La Femme Nikita author Luc Besson, takes the sort of breezy approach to realism that characterizes most of his action pieces: Mills runs afoul of the French police once or twice, foils them easily, and then never sees them again. After the first hour or so, the story begins to feel as if it’s set in its own discrete universe, where police authority doesn’t exist and there is only one man against relative legions of hapless foes.

Neeson’s single-minded performance burns with the steady, quiet intensity of a welding torch: wherever he goes, sparks fly. Neeson plays Mills as cold yet passionate, a man who has no problem with crossing lines of morality when the situation calls for it. Nor is he a mindless one-man army; equally as thrilling as the action pieces are Mills’ bluffs and infiltrations, like James Bond without the smugness or expensive ties. The result is  brutal, yet refreshing, as Mills takes on the qualities of a predatory juggernaut, to the point where listening to the villains threaten a handcuffed and helpless Neeson evokes an indulgent smile rather than a frown of concern. You already know that Neeson is going to break out and kill everyone in the room. The only question is how satisfying it’s going to be when he does.

Ironically, Taken’s biggest flaw is also its greatest strength: what you see is what you get. The film starts with a simple setup, and spends the remainder of its runtime delivering on that setup. There are few narrative risks , and though there are a handful of satisfying surprises, the rhythm of Taken will be very familiar to most action fans.

That said, Taken is deeply satisfying:  a lean, fat-free cut of action-movie goodness, rare and bloody, served up with a grim smile. Savor it.