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Taken

I know Taken has been out for a few weeks, but what can I say? I’m always late to the new release party. I have no excuse.

What I do have are a particular set of skills.

You know, sometimes it’s just fun to watch bad guys get the crap kicked out of them for no other reason than they are bad. Some people are very good at doing just that.

Skills I have acquired over a lifetime.

And at the same time, it’s fun to watch one of your favorite actors take on the role of the ass kicker. For example, it was all kinds of awesome watching Charles Bronson at work in Death Wish. It was amazing watching the hunters (muggers) become the prey.

Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.

Here, that actor is Liam Neeson, someone I’ve enjoyed watching since I first saw him as an Irish terrorist on Miami Vice. He’s a marvel at playing a suave gentleman, whose face can be open and warm one moment, then close, frozen, and lethal in the next. Here, he plays a tired and retired CIA professional. The asses he is kicking traffic in involuntary sex slaves. He’s a man of simple wants and desires.

If you let my daughter go, that will be the end of it.

When his 17-year-old daughter travels to Paris, she is kidnapped by the asses in need of kicking. Neeson has to listen to this happen over the phone. There’s not a lot he can do since, at the time, he’s in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, he does know what needs to be done.

But if you don’t, I will hunt you.

And so he’s off to Paris, seeking targets for his very large boots. And fists. And an assortment of weapons he finds along the way, including two very large nails, used in a rather imaginative, if direct, way.

I will find you.

Naturally, he finds them, otherwise there’s not much of a plot. He is, after all, a man of his word.

And I will kill you.

In a way, Taken plays out like a modern “re-imagining” of The Searchers, but it’s much more visceral, lacking any contemplative tone. It’s also relentlessly anti-PC. The villains are either of Albanian or Middle Eastern extract. I know, you’re saying, “Well, they do tend to traffic in sex slaves, don’t they, so isn’t this rather, er, authentic?” Perhaps, but those who traffic in identity politics rather eagerly took offense at Taken, and so we must acknowledge it’s relentless ability to tweak PC noses.

It is, for the record, also less than kind to the French, who, in the film, seem perfectly willing to cooperate with – and profit from – this horrific trade.

But who cares? This is a film written and produced by Luc Besson, so it is guaranteed to have some level of the ridiculous. It’s also directed by Pierre Morel, who directed the deliriously enjoyable District B13. In short, Taken is all about the action and not a lot about the thinking. It delivers.

It has some problems, most involving how the action sequences are spliced together. Is it too much to ask that we bring an end to the era of shaky cam? I know I’m not the only one making this complaint. It was all right in the first Bourne film, kind of acceptable in the second, and completely horrible in the third. Here, it likes somewhere between 2 and 3 on the Bourne shakeometer scale. This is especially egregious given how cleanly Morel staged his action sequences in District B13.

The film does make a good effort toward making some amount of sense. You can at least follow along on most of the clues Neeson is developing, enough so that you can accept when A leads to 62. This is unlike other, more allegedly intelligent action films, like the horrible third Bourne film. (I keep bringing up the Bourne films because they’ve somehow become some sort of gold standard for action films, when it reality they went downhill like a nitro fueled bowling ball. If you really want to establish a gold standard, please use Kill Bill: Vol. 1, especially the Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves. My opinion, for what it’s worth.)

So, alas, Taken will never be nominated for an Academy award, and that’s all right. It’s that sort of anti-Oscar film that easily rules the box office and the hearts of its fans. There’s little fluff to the story or the film. It knows what it’s about and gets right to business, with just enough heart to allow us to cheer for Neeson.

There are worse ways to spend 90 minutes of your time; at the moment, they’re aren’t many that are better.

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