By Linda Winsh-Bolard
Bryan (Liam Neeson) gave up his job in sate security to spend more time with his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). The relationship is rocky; when Kim was growing up Daddy was away working and Mom has remarried rather well. Her new husband showers attentions and gift on both, Mom and Kim.
Now seventeen, Kim is precocious, demanding, silly and very pretty. While Daddy is trying to help her get going with her dream career of singing (that much of a cliché?) Kim is invited to go with her friend Mandy to Paris- for a whole year. Bryan has misgiving about letting a seventeen and a nineteen year old to go and live abroad, but he gives in to pressure and promises of good behavior and supervision.
The girls get to Paris airport where a good looking stranger named Peter offers to share his taxi with them to save money. They agree even though it’s clear they have money to spare.
Peter is employed as a “spotter”, his job is to locate attractive tourists coming to Paris, find out their addresses and circumstances and to determine if they are an easy target for abduction.
Less then hour after they met him, Mandy and Kim are abducted from their apartment to be sold into prostitution.
The scene where Kim observes Mandy being “taken” while on the phone with Bryan, terrified on the verge of hysteria, yet trying to follow the equally scared Dad’s instructions, is the best in the film. When Neeson says: They will take you, the film reaches its pivotal moment.
Unfortunately, it was in the fist third of the movie.
The rest is predictable.
Bryan finds out that the abductors are part of an Albanian group that has an ongoing trade in women and drugs, and had switched from bringing in women to abduction on the spot to save on transportation costs. He is told that he has 96 hours to find his daughter before she disappears forever. His French security friend is corrupt. The girls are doped and auctioned off. Nobody cares. Bryan is a lone wolf wreaking havoc during his attempts to get his daughter back.
There are plenty of shootings, falling dead bodies, seedy sides of Paris and chases. Stark imagines of poverty and the world not shown in tourist’s brochures. The life of an underpaid civil servant who does not care where the extra money comes from. The men who never connect the dots between their kids and the other humans. Yet, all of it remains largely detached because Bryan’s focus is narrow and he never attempts to help anyone but himself. In a sense, he too is an owner.
American “savior” films suffer almost always from the same deficiency: an inability to make a general statement. Focused on saving the one precious object, they overlook all other sweeping problems left behind; in this case the entire network kidnapping young people and their fate in the captivity. Bryan is willing to forgo the whole investigation if his daughter is returned to him, just Kim not even Mandy. For any story dealing with corruption, a general closure is necessary but in “Taken” Mandy is conveniently disposed off and no other victim is even mentioned. It lessens any potential impact the film might have had. Traffic comes to mind.
It is largely one-man movie and Liam Neeson does his best to come across as the devoted dad with special skill of classical hard-core fighters. He plays somewhat confused human hunted by past well. His best partner is the small, linear role of Kim’s Mother portrayed by Femke Jenssen. I remember her as a strong girl fighter. Hollywood shaved her body, and her part, to splinter but the strength is still in there, she is wasted in here.
A word of advice: if you wish the audience to feel for an abducted teenager, then by all means make her realistically obnoxious but also visually ordinary. Few teenagers are seven feet tall and two inches wide. Even if many are floppy and overbearing. Make all of them real. It helps the story’s credibility.
Directed by Pierre Morel, Screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, Camera: Michel Ambramowitz.
