Take my daughter, please

Taken is a how-to on knocking people out. In most circumstances it only requires the butt of a pistol; in others a stale fart will do just fine. I’m reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s entire career: he could snap necks like they were glass pretzels. As brittle as the bad guys’ spines were it’s amazing they didn’t kill themselves putting their shirts on in the morning. The baddies in Taken apparently come from the same weak-neck gene pool.



Liam Neeson, who plays Taken’s knocker-outer, has a daughter who jets off to Europe to follow U2 on tour. Three minutes in Paris and she’s kidnapped to be sold on the black market as an unspoiled American teenager — they fetch a high price apparently. During the abduction she’s able to phone daddy, an ex-CIA operative named Bryan Mills, who gets some important clues from the hectic phone call. The movie provides us the villains’ names, although I’m sure it was fudging a little because the clues weren’t that specific.



Mills feeds off the Jack Bauer/Jason Statham adrenaline rush that most action movies are plugging into these days. That’s not a complaint, just an observation. In fact, the short attention span feeds into Taken rather smoothly — it’s a movie that is best not left to dawdle. It helps that Neeson, a gifted actor, can play the maniacal father with a deep-seated rage that makes his avenging angel terrifying and also cathartic. In one sequence he massacres an entire house of teen smugglers, a scene that in another movie would have seemed cruel and vicious — in Taken it feels necessary. Mostly, though, Mills just knocks people out on his daughter’s zig-zagging trail into the underworld of human smuggling; after all, Taken’s PG-13. The same film with an R rating would be kinda interesting.



Taken, which moves fast enough to feel like a cardio routine, paints Paris worse than most movies paint Tijuana or Fallujah. Paris apparently is the scum-bag capital of the entire northern hemisphere: hunky spotters stalk the airports, dirty cops lead the police force, and coked-out prostitutes are chained to every radiator in Paris. They’re also in the break room at a 24-hour construction site, where foreigners toil through the night producing mud pits, showers of sparks and fire drums that people can warm their hands over — the perfect setting for an action scene. And these aren’t just prostitutes: they’re kidnapped tourists, often Americans like Mills’ daughter, who’s played by Maggie Grace (Lost), a 25-year-old actress who conveys a 17-year-old by running everywhere giggling and/or sobbing.



Taken is not the smartest thriller made, nor is it the most comprehensible, but it makes up for its failures with pure neck-snapping adrenaline. So much so that it should come with a chiropractor.