Movie Review - Taken starring Liam Neeson

OMG. If I beg, pretty please with sugar on top, can I please, please get those two hours of my life back? I won't even ask for a refund of the $50.00 it cost for three of us to go and eat some popcorn.

Liam Neeson in Taken

I love action movies. My family can all attest to this - I would rather see James Bond than Sophie's Choice. But when they take someone of Liam Neeson's stature and throw him in an action hero role, well, the writing and the plot better hold up. I don't think they did in this venture.

Liam Neeson's character is a former CIA "preventer". When his 17 year old daughter Kim asks him what that means, he replies that it was his job to prevent bad things from happening. If that's so, how come he couldn't prevent this movie from being made?

Liam has quit the CIA in order to move to California to be closer to his daughter. I had a big problem with the premise from the start. Unless he has been living in a vacumn for the last century, he had to know that she is going to graduate from high school soon, go off to college and there is really no need to turn your own life upside down to go be near her. Not unless you are planning to move to wherever she attends college. Then you can move to wherever she finally gets a job, and maybe you can live with her when she gets married. Come on. You don't have to live near someone to be close to them. You can visit, after all, and so can she. So if he didn't realize this wasn't going to achieve his goal, he was delusional. A delusional CIA agent. Hmm. That might be an oxymoron.

Now that he lives closer, he is visited by his former CIA buddies who talk him into helping them with a security gig. He protects a Britney Spears-type singer from a man with a knife and wins her devotion. His own daughter wants to be a singer so she gives him her vocal coach and agent's name...aww. Wasn't that sweet? Liam intends to give the info to the daughter when she asks to meet him for lunch, only to be sidetracked when she reveals that she met him (with his ex-wife Famke Jensen in tow) because she needs his signature on a passport application. The daughter wants to go to Paris with her friend for a few weeks. Since she's 17, she needs him to sign.

Being former CIA and aware of the dangers in the world, Liam is not comfortable with two 17 year olds going to Paris alone, but he eventually caves. He insists that the daughter call him on arrival in Paris and every night...and he provides the phone for her to use. She promises and off she goes.

On arrival in Paris we find that she not only forgets to call him, the cousins of her friend that they are supposed to staying with are in Spain. So they are on their own in the big city. While waiting for a taxi a young Frenchman approaches and asks to share a cab, then invites them to a party later that day. As they enter the residence and he walks away, he calls someone on his phone and gives the address.

Daddy Liam keeps calling the phone and finally she answers. When she does, she apologizes, then looks across the courtyard window to see that several men are now in the house and forcibly taking her friend. Liam gives her instructions on what to do and tells her he will find her. Then she is also "taken".

It gets weird from here. Liam gets into one insane situation after another trying to find her. He goes ape-you-know-what at the airport and although he is initially chased by police, he walks around free. He steals cars, he breaks into places and never gets a scratch. And you know what is almost worst? His hair looks like crap throughout the entire movie. The back is like crazy. Like it needs cut, for one, and it sticks out like it's never been washed, and he leaned back on something and then came back up. You know what I mean. This sort of shows the look (I couldn't find a pic from the back):


The movie ends on a WTF? moment when Dad and daughter return to the U.S. (how'd they get out of France with the police looking for him?). She diddy-bops out of the jetway into Mom's arms but it's more like she's coming home from a rock concert than having been drugged and sold into white slavery. But then again, I guess you would have had to have a brain to have psychological damage.

I read online someone having the temerity to compare this to the Jason Bourne movies. Give me a break! Those movies rock, and the situations are certainly more plausible than they are here.

One good thing, though. Liam has lost weight and I know he's going to play Abraham Lincoln in Steven Speilberg's production of Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals. I think he'll look like him - he has the height and now the gauntness. Sure hope he can lose that accent.