Review: Taken
If James Bond is to be believed, secret agents love nothing better than decamping to some exotic corner of the Mediterranean out of reach of pesky villains. Not Bryan Mills, the poor fool. After a career with the CIA as a self-described “preventer of bad things,” he is divorced and alone. Worst of all, he has sentenced himself to a monotonous retirement that consists of nothing more than eating Chinese takeout, scoping the price of small electronics, and reliving the few memories of his daughter Kim’s childhood in his possession.
If the idea of spending 90 minutes with Mills in French director Pierre Morel’s new thriller “Taken” doesn’t quite entice, rest easy, for the plot burdens us with only a rough sketch of a launch pad before rocketing off into outer space.
Daughter Kim, whom Mills has firmly frozen at age 5 in memory reruns, has grown into a leggy brunette of 17, though her mind may have been left behind. She has few opinions of her own, and she is kept on a tight leash by her mother, who loves to watch the now impotent ex-spy suffer for his sins of past neglect.
With a teary pout and a guilt trip, mother and daughter strong-arm Mills into letting Kim and a friend spend a summer in Paris. But no sooner does Kim and friend step off the plane are the two snatched by a gang of Albanian human traffickers.
Who can save her from sexual slavery in under 96 hours (including the flight to Paris)? You guessed it.
In essence, the film is built around an oversized character, both figuratively and literally. Neeson towers a good 6 inches above the rest of the cast and so do his ass-kicking skills.
“I don’t know you who you are. I don’t know what you want… But what I do have are a very particular set of skills acquired over a very long career in the shadows, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you… I will look for you, I will find you. And I will kill you.” So goes the Mills Manifesto.
From there, Mills — who by now has traded in his grunge plaids for a svelte leather jacket — shreds through paper-thin stock characters — beady-eyed, card-playing Albanians, corrupt bureaucrats, and fat and oily Arabs bidding on “certified pure” cream of the sex worker crop are just a few — without a soupçon of mercy.
In fact, no amount of deserved innocence registers in Mills’s single minded focus, other than the innocence of his baby girl. Like 2008’s cringe-worthy “Bangkok Dangerous,” “Taken” is a socially unconscious thriller.
He may not be licensed to kill, but that’s not gonna stop him.
