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Oskar Schindler's Got A Gun | Liam Neeson tears Paris apart in his search for his teenage daughter in Taken

Taken

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TAKEN
Directed by Pierre Morel. Starring Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace. Opens Fri, Jan 30.
***

If Bryan Mills, the hero of Taken, ever met Jack Bauer from 24 — it’s not impossible; they both live in L.A. — they’d find they have a lot in common. They’re both rough-and-tumble government agents who don’t play by the rules, who’d much rather be in the field, punching out henchmen, than taking orders from some suit behind a desk. They don’t think twice about torturing bad guys to get the information they need to save innocent lives. And somehow they’ve both managed to raise bubbleheaded teenage daughters named Kim who can’t cross the street without getting kidnapped.

In Taken, the kidnappers are a well-organized group of Albanians who spot pretty, young female travellers at the Paris airport, follow them to their hotel, abduct them, get them addicted to drugs, and then either turn them into prostitutes or auction them off to rich, swarthy businessmen to be deflowered. (Kim is played by Lost’s Maggie Grace, who at 25 is clearly a decade older than her character is supposed to be. I assume this is the filmmakers’ way to make their premise seem a little less sleazy, but making an adult actress like Grace behave like a squealing teen has the unintended side effect of making Kim seem even stupider.)

Anyhow, I’m sure you don’t need me to draw you a road map to figure out how this story plays out: after learning that the corrupt Paris police force won’t be helping him retrieve his daughter — and with the clock ticking down the hours before she’s smuggled into another country, never to be found again — Mills (Liam Neeson, in a rare action role) does the job all by himself. Only when the bodies start piling up do the Albanians realize that they’ve fucked with the wrong Irishman.

Now, there are two possible reactions to a movie like Taken. You can choose to repudiate it as a shamelessly manipulative, xenophobic, button-pushing piece of rubbish ... or you can admire it, perhaps a bit begrudgingly, as a ruthlessly efficient, cleanly made revenge picture. Myself, I’m leaning slightly in the second direction. This is yet another film from the Luc Besson movie factory, and it has the slick production values, the sleek storytelling (the movie is barely 90 minutes long), the interestingly textured European backdrops, and the crisply choreographed action scenes that characterize pretty much everything Besson puts his name to. Taken was written by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, his collaborator on all the Transporter movies, but they’ve smartly tailored the fights in this movie to Neeson’s persona. Instead of the balletic, outrageously choreographed battles they devised for Jason Statham, Taken is all about no-fuss brutality: Neeson’s favourite approach is to batter his opponent senseless with his fists, then empty his gun into his head.

You’ve also got to give Besson and Kamen points for cunningly establishing Neeson as a divorced dad who’s clearly the better man, but who can’t complete with his ex-wife’s rich new husband (played by Xander Berkeley, one of Kiefer Sutherland’s dickish, deskbound bosses from 24). It’s the Die Hard principle at work: any woman who decides to “trade up” from a husband in law enforcement will require him to defeat an international group of criminals within two weeks of the divorce papers going through.