Maybe Liam Neeson’s sudden veer into action movies shouldn’t have surprised us as much as it did back in 2008 when he showed up in Taken, beating sex traffickers into the next life with unparalleled gusto. After all, one of his earliest roles was a supporting part as a lothario in the cult fantasy misfire Krull, he played the title role in Sam Raimi’s kooky, pulp, superhero gig, Darkman and let’s not forget that he’s also a genuine, certified Jedi master in The Phantom Menace.
However, Taken was something diffrent – for a start, Qui-Gon Jinn didn’t trawl around the scum pits of the outer rim, brutalising evil doers in a fetching leather jacket… or at least, I don’t think he did. Still, armed with a particular sets of skills, an insanely unsubtle script co-written by Luc Besson as possibly one of the most bitchin’ quotes in the history of modern action cinema, Neeson suddenly found himself rebranded as a credible action star virtually over night, which is actually quite bizarre when you realised that this is a man who has also played both Michael Collins and Oskar Schindler…
After many years serving his country as first a Green Beret and then a CIA operative, Bryan Mills is using his retirement to try and heal the rifts caused by putting his family second all these years but is finding it tough. For a start his wife, Lenore, has remarried the super wealthy businessman Stuart and his daughter, Kim, has rapidly hit seventeen, but while he truly wants to makes things right, his super meticulous nature and mistrust of a world he helped protect means that he’s often massively overprotective and cautious to a fault.
This becomes incredibly apparent when he learns that Kim wants to take a holiday in Paris with her more free-spirited friend Amanda and immediately puts his foot down as he seems convinced that anyone who sets foot out of the United States has immediately set themselves up as a magnet for all manner of heinous shit; but after finally relenting, Bryan’s actually proven right when both Kim and Amanda are targeted by sex traffickers and are taken from their hotel room while Mills is on the phone with her – bet we won’t hear the end of that one… Switching into his old ways after delivering the mother of all threats to the one trafficker dumb enough to pick up Kim’s phone, Bryan takes all the available clues he has and charges into France with the notion of getting his daughter back and inflicting as much pain as humanly possible as he climbs the ladder of organised crime – and murders every fucking rung he can get his mitts on.
However, the higher he climbs, the more complex the organization becomes as sneering street punks and Albanian gangster make way for corrupt police and billionaire sheikhs – so can Bryan make good on his earlier, iconic threat, or will the overwhelming odds make a liar out of him as he fights endless thugs to get his little girl back.
“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 people 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.”
With one single, perfectly delivered speech, Liam Neeson pretty much did 85% of the work needed to convince the world he could throw hands with the best of them in around sixty seconds worth of dialogue. It contained all the righteous threat of Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum speech with all the absurd menace of Arnold Schwarzenegger spouting “I’ll be back” in any 80s flick of his you’d care to name and it instantly because the movie phrase du joir to quote after Jules Winfield’s Ezekiel 25:17 scene for film jocks who wanted to seem cool.
But beyond a section of dialogue so memorably delivered it actually featured on one of the posters, did Taken actually live up to the threat that it’s lead growled down a phone line? Well, that kind of depends what you were hoping to get out of it in the first place really. As a counterpoint to the artful thrillers that made Luc Besson’s name, the scripts he wrote for countless, kooky action film during the 90s and 00s often felt they had been written by a random action plot generator and only really came to life once a director of vision or a lead actor with some heft would attach themselves to it. Thus there’s a case to be made that Taken is Neeson and as a result, he is the one who has to bring legitimacy to the thing – no matter how silly things get. However, while a lot of Besson’s action productions fell back on gimmicks (behold the parkour in District 13), martial art legends (Jet Li in Kiss Of The Dragon), or cartoonish stunts (virtually ever second of The Transporter), Taken was a far more somber, brooding affair that sees a lethal papa bear lay waste to the back streets of Paris in order to return his stolen cub.
Taken as a slick neck-snapper, the film works just fine as director Pierre Morel works hard to create a harsh, violent world while the editing team work even harder furiously editing Neeson’s flailing hand movements in order to create a lightning fast fighting style the more cynical of you might dub Edit-Fu. However, as basic a premise Taken has, Neeson’s sheer, growly presence manages to elevate everything he touches and his grizzled, dogged nature makes you genuinely believe he’s not a guy to be fucked with. However, while Mills’ character trate of being ridiculously meticulous and suspicious of almost everything is played up as a virtue, I couldn’t help but see it as something of a mental illness gone awry that result in a psychotic helicopter parent who us only the hero because his deranged view of the world is proved right.
Another issue I had with Taken is that – if I’m being brutally honest – it’s pretty fucking racist too if you choose to look at it in a certain kind of way. Not only does it have a hysterically xenophobic view of France that sees Maggie Grace’s Kim approached by bad guys the very second she leave the airport, but her and her friend have barely time to settle in their new digs until villains come calling to carry them away to a life of drugs and degradation – which is kinda odd considering that Besson’s French himself. Similarly, almost every single bad guy, save two random white people are of foreign decent which leads to scenes of Neeson clubbing, shooting and torturing endless amounts of brown people which tends to get a little uncomfortable after a while.
However, if you can look past a couple of iffy red flags, Taken is an accomplished, lean mean ass-kicking machine that barely has a trace of fat thanks to an admirably short runtime and even it’s slightly skewed view of women (Kim’s a victim, Famke Janssen’s ex wife is portrayed as a b-word for not sharing Bryan misanthropic view of the world) can’t quite dull the satisfying sight of Neeson interrogating a room full of traffickers who don’t even know they’re being interrogated and then murdering the whole fucking lot of them.
Problematic and iconic in equal measure, there’s no doubting Neeson’s worth as a big screen angel of justice, it’s just that large parts of the film should probably be taken with large pinches of salt.
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