Taken blew me away with it's old fashioned plot, pace and length. Scott, it is surprisingly only one hour and a half long. It is reminiscent of John Wayne's Big Jake. The bad guys in both films underestimate a man of action when it involves family. A line near the end of Taken could have very well have been spoken by Wayne. A scumbag, begs for his life by saying, "Please understand...it was all business. It was not personal." Neeson responds, "It was all personal to me."
As the movie opens, Bryan is divorced and well into middle age. He is a former government field agent, who is trying to connect to his teenage daughter. His ex-wife is remarried to a very rich man and the only thing his daughter seems to need from him is his approval to travel to Paris for the summer. Up until this point in the movie you feel sorry for Bryan. He seems like he is half asleep. As if he is walking though his days in a bit of a blur. He is completely out of place at his own daughters birthday party.
When his daughter gets abducted, everything about him changes. He is suddenly in control of his actions in a way that he was not as the ex-husband. The kidnappers grab his daughter while she is on her cell with him. Bryan tells the man in a calm, confident voice, "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." Neeson's tone convinces you that it is not an idle threat.
The pace takes off once Bryan begins his pursuit of the abductors and the movie never slows down. As soon as he finds the last person who saw his daughter before the abduction, you know he is not playing around. He grabs the guy, throws him in a Taxi and starts pounding away on him. There is no playing around. Bryan is a man on a mission and he does not have the time for niceties. Some of the things he does in order to find his daughter may shock you. An innocent house wife pays a price for her husbands dealings.
The scene where he finds the man from the conversation on the phone is great. "You don't remember me? We spoke on the phone two days ago. I told you I would find you." Even though the kidnapper is surrounded by five friends, Bryan's confident statement leaves you in no doubt that he still has the upper hand. It is very much like the scene in Big Jake when John Wayne says to the kidnapper, "And now you understand. Anything goes wrong, anything at all... your fault, my fault, nobody's fault... it won't matter - I'm gonna blow your head off."
Taken is gloriously and surprisingly politically incorrect. Bryan mercilessly tortures someone, and gets results. In another scene, Bryan is pretending to work for the French police when he says to some Albanian Immigrants, "You come to this country, take advantage of the system and think because we are tolerant that we are weak and helpless. Your arrogance offends me." It is nice to know that some people, like Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, are brave enough to write such in your face scenes and lines.
