Reviewed by Geno McGahee
I don’t know why it took me so long to watch this flick. I guess it’s because I lost so much hope with Hollywood and their action films. I remember being so excited for THE TRANSPORTER when I first saw the commercial with him kicking the door and launching a guy 20 feet. It looked like a preview for INSANE JEHOVAH’S WITNESS, a good idea for a movie, by the way. When I watched the movie, it was so horrible, and yet, this Jason Statham continues to get work and make money. I even tried his other movies in hopes that he was OK in other films, but they all stunk. What was promising about TAKEN was that it has Liam Neeson in the lead role as Bryan Mills.
Neeson knows how to act, delivers lines well, and if he was given the right script, he would do really well. He was given the right script. In TAKEN, he is a single guy that has moved close to his 17 year old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), in hopes that he can be a bigger part of her young adult life. As a child, she hardly saw him because of his work with the government. He was a professional ass kicker, basically. His ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen) has remarried a guy with money falling out of his ass and has no love for Bryan. She makes it clear. As I watched this, I said to myself: “What a freaking bitch!” Hat’s off to Janssen for playing it so well.
Kim wants to go to Paris with her friend, but she needs her dad’s signature. He won’t do it, but he gets bugged enough by his ex and daughter to finally relent and sign, but he’s been lied to. She wants to follow the band U2 around Europe and that alone would piss me off. Am I the only one that thinks U2 sucks? It’s no wonder why Bryan was pissed off. Why not follow a great band like Winger? But the point is not about whether Winger is a better band than U2 (and they are), it’s about his daughter lying to him and going to Europe under false pretenses.
Against his better judgment, Bryan agrees to not make a fuss and let her go, but his worse suspicions come true when she gets kidnapped and put into a sex slave ring. Those sex slave rings are everywhere. It’s a pretty popular topic in film today.
Bryan heads to Paris and begins uncovering the sex ring and begins hunting for his daughter, leaving plenty of dead bodies along the way. Neeson is so great in this role and makes me get excited about the A-TEAM movie. He goes in there and beats the shit out of everyone and the editing is so good with the fight scenes that you can’t help but to get excited and even jump out of your seat and kick things. I threw my coffee table through my window and then beat up the mailman, asking him where my daughter was. I was so fucking excited!
As the movie progresses, it gets more exciting and more violent. The deeper that Bryan gets into the ring, the more chaotic it gets. He is just a bad ass. He even shoots his friend’s wife in the arm to get some information.
In the end, when he is chasing down his daughter and jumps onto a boat from a bridge, killing many security personnel, the intensity is at an all time high. You know he’s going to save her, but you are still screaming: “Get that cocksucker, Neeson!” I couldn’t believe my wife screamed that, or maybe I just thought it. I have never heard her use that word, so it’s odd that she comes out with it during the movie. Now that I think about it, I probably shouted it.
This movie brings you into the sleazy world of sex slavery…so it’s educational, like 8MM was with Nicolas Cage. There, you learned about snuff films. Here you learn about sex rings. And they say its mindless violence!
TAKEN is a great action film that keeps you glued to the screen from start to finish. This is such a wonderful movie and Neeson should continue to make movies like this. Maybe a sequel. If they can make 3 TRANSPORTERS, they can make another TAKEN. I cannot recommend this movie enough. I want to watch it again.
Scared Stiff Rating: 9/10. Get that cocksucker, Neeson!
