Movie Review: Taken

*This review contains "spoilers" for a rather predictable plot!*

So I caught this movie for the second time on TV last night and the second watching really saw the film pulling itself to pieces for me.

Now, I hate to rant on a film starring Liam Neeson, who portrayed the lovable "Dad" in Fallout 3, but I think the problem with this movie is really the script.

He gives a pretty decent performance with what he's given, but the whole film is like power trip father-revenge pornography. The film is pretty much just "I AM A DAD, DAMMIT, AND SO I AM JUSTIFIED TO SHOOT PEOPLE!11oneone!"

The plot concerns a CIA agent named Bryan (Neeson) whose daughter is kidnapped by an Albanian Mafia group. The group specialises in prostitution and Neeson's character is promptly told in dramatic fashion that he'll probably never see her again within a few days.

Anyway, this setup is all pretty irrelevant, the entire story of the film basically boils down to "Dad murders lots of bad men, happy ending." There's essentially no character development aside from "I'm pissed off, where is my daughter?" and the typical whiny ex-wife character that gets 2 minutes of screen time.

The bad guys are all completely 1 dimensional amoral arseholes and exist only to spout dickish lines before they get executed in a suitably violent fashion by the enraged Neeson.

While it has trappings of a Thriller, it has the despoiled brains of an Action film.

Take the ending, which is absolutely ludicrous and kind of reminded me of Mirror's Edge. Neeson spends 90% of the film killing people, whether by snapping necks, beating them senseless, stabbing them or just substantially altering their blood-lead molar ratio.

He has no government backing for these vigilante murder sprees and makes next to no effort to cover his tracks, he just storms in and starts piling up the corpses. We even see the police after him at one point.

So when he kills the final bad guy, does he go down for life? Or maybe he gets a death sentence for the amount of carnage he wrought?

Err, no. Actually he just takes a leisurely stroll to the airport with his daughter and goes back home to live happily ever after. Let's ignore the 50 or so people he killed, they were bad after all and so there are no repurcussions...

There is also a kind of half-arsed attempt to make Neeson's character anti-heroish. Neeson plays the part with skill, and so this actually kind of works (such as in a rather unpleasant torture scene, easily the agent's most morally dubious act).

The problem is, there is no heart to it. The film poses no moral questions, without which the whole idea of an anti-hero is kind of pointless. One minute we are encouraged to think "Wow, Bryan is actually quite a merciless dickhead", but the rest of the time the film is back to "Bad people have to die 'cos they're bad."

The action itself is quite engaging, some of the scenes, such as a shootout and the conversation beforehand in a run-down block of apartments are pretty well done. In general the film is well choreographed.

That's the only thing really that lets me save the rating a bit to 2.5/5 (rounded to 3).

If you watch it as a brainless action flick it's kind of entertaining, just don't be lured in by the false pretense that it's anything deeper, because you'll be disappointed.

It's also quite amusing how xenophobic Taken is. Literally all but one foreign character is portrayed as some kind of corrupt tosspot.  Uncle Sam's people are almost all intelligent and helpful, but every French, Albanian or Arabic person is of course a complete dick, if not an outright bad guy (which they normally morph into as the film progresses).

Still, Hollywood has long been like that, so it's no real surprise.

2.5/5 --> 3/5.

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