Taken (**1/4)

Okay, so this looked like revenge porn to me, and I didn’t want to see it. I wondered what Liam Neeson was doing playing some ex-CIA dude who goes and kicks ass after his daughter gets kidnapped. But a couple of people told me, no, it’s a good action movie.  So now, having seen it, it still looked like revenge porn to me. In case you don’t know what that is, owing to the fact that I just made the term up, it means…well, searching online says it means posting compromising photos or video of your ex online. But what I mean is cinema that seems geared not to telling an interesting story but rather setting up a scenario in which the wronged hero can display a lot of righteous anger and mete out violence in which the audience can vicariously participate.

A bullshit plot is not an absolute requirement for the subgenre, but in practice tends to follow, because there are not that many real-world situations like the ones in these movies. So anyway, Neeson plays a divorced dad who’s retired so he can spend more time with his seventeen-year-old. Unlike her mother (Famke Janssen), he knows her secret desire to be a singer, and he once skipped out on an assignment just to fly 9000 miles and not miss her birthday. So the point is, he will do anything for his daughter. 

Dad’s nervous about her wanting to hang with her friend in Paris. He’s worried it’s too dangerous, which is kind of a riot since they live in Los Angeles. But they go, and there’s only just enough time for us to find out the daughter’s a virgin before she is…TAKEN! (Her naive friend, literally too stupid to live, is not a virgin. She may or may not have parents. They’re never seen.) Some damn Albanians want to make her into a virgin sex toy for some wealthy pervert. (I was very curious about the virginity-detecting system they used, but that part is all off screen.) You know the rest; there are essentially no plot twists for me to give away. It’s basically Neeson doing his best Keifer Sutherland-on-24 imitation for the next 75 minutes. So eager to bust heads is he that he lets the first guy get away by drawing attention to himself. He gets the odd bit of help from old colleagues, one of whom apparently has the ability to tell which small town in Albania someone’s from just by listening to a short cell-phone recording. 

I enjoyed the parts where Neeson actually gets to use esoteric skills like jury-rigging an IV drip, hot-wiring a car, and using the reflection in a cell-phone photo to ID the photographer. There a decent car chase too, but basically the whole point is to go from place to place and watch people being slaughtered, with and without torture. The ex-CIA man does this skillfully, too, and no one lies to him. One thing lacking is a supervillain. Usually these movies feature a showdown in which the most powerful among the bad guys gets a spectacular death. That’s one cliché avoided, though it make the final rescue nearly anticlimactic. None of the sex-trade folks, in fact, stands out at all. They’re interchangeable cogs.

So if you like this kind of thing, you’re welcome to it. It’s very well-paced, and Neeson metes out justice in a less smug (but very convincing) manner than your typical action star. I don’t mind violence, but it’s distasteful to me when the whole film seems to be crafted with that in mind. (The horror subgenre called torture porn goes this one better, or one worse, by having you in some way root for the villain, not the virgin.) I was surprised to see that this was directed by Pierre Morel and cowritten by Luc Besson; their other collaboration was the far more original District B13, which was violent but incorporated brilliant action scenes, a better plot, and far more panache.

IMDB link

viewed  at Moorestown and reviewed 2/28/09