Grade: D
(Spoiler Alert! Don't read if you don't want to know the end! But it sucks so you might as well read!)
"Taken" is kind of like my neighbor's cocker spaniel; it can be sweet, but in the end it's just dumb as a rock.
While director Pierre Morel and writer Luc Besson may have hit the mark with their 2004 film "District B13," they have successfully managed to toss this one into the toilet. The plot sucks, the characters suck, and the acting is terrible. Sometimes this may work if the film purposefully doesn't take itself seriously, but it seems like Morel and Besson actually tried, which is just sad.
The film shoots out of the gate quickly, and viewers are introduced to Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), an ex-goverment worker spy person or something who has thrown away his life in an attempt to become closer to his 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who lives with his ex-wife and a rich asshole of a step father.
He discovers that Kim and her friend Amanda want to travel to France for a vacation, and because Kim is a minor, he is forced to give his consent for her to leave the country. The girls say their plan is to stay in Paris with Amanda's cousins for the duration of the trip, and Bryan gives in after some futile arguing. A few pointless plot twists later, the girls arrive in Europe, and are almost instantly kidnapped (yay for Paris). Fortunately, Kim and Bryan are on the phone when it happens, and Bryan ends up talking to one of the kidnappers. He then uses this tiny bit of information to determine exactly what organization has taken his daughter. It turns out that the organization sells people into the sex slave business, and Bryan has 96 hours to find his daughter before she disappears forever.
So Bryan does what any good ex-spy father would do: he goes on a killing rampage. (Now before I go further, I should say that I really do like Liam Neeson. He's a pretty good actor and seems like a cool guy, but he doesn't seem like the kind of person to play a killing machine. It has to be an Arnold or Van Damme, not Neeson. He's not threatening enough. I can see him getting cranky and throwing a good punch, but torturing and slamming peoples' heads into walls? Not so much.)
So Byan proceeds to shoot, electrocute and beat the crap out of everybody in France, and ironically there is very little blood. (Apparently killing everybody is okay in a PG-13 movie as long as there is no blood.) He finds Amanda dead midway through the movie, but kills another 20 people or so to make it all better. He then finally rescues Kim at the last minute by shooting a sweaty bald fat guy in the face, and they return home happy.
As stated before, this film could have worked had it taken itself less seriously, or maybe even if it added some realism. Any realism, really.
Forget that Bryan is an unstoppable killing machine and that there isn't blood, the characters are just plain boring. Does Luc Besson ever go outside and interact with people to see what they're actually like? (He must, unless he cuts that ridiculous hair himself, but that's a very real possiblity; just look at him in the picture to the left.)Neeson's character is the only one with relatively any depth, and I'm convinced that Grace (who plays Kim) doesn't know crap about acting. She overacts in every scene, playing the stereotypical teen, and even at the end she doesn't even seem to give a shit that she narrowly escaped being a sex slave and that her friend was killed. It was just another Tuesday I guess.
If you want to see a killing rampage, rent "Commando," because at least it has Arnold and some cheesy one-liners.
