Taken

An ex-CIA agent, who quit the life in an effort to be closer to his estranged daughter, faces his worst nightmare. While vacationing in Paris, she is kidnapped by sex traders (after a very tense phone call when it all goes down), and it is up to him to go over there and bust as many heads as he can find until he gets her back.

Looked at from a certain way, this movie doesn't seem like much. It's got an interesting enough premise (propelled by a damn fine trailer and poster) for a revenge flick, but once things actually get going the plot quickly loses some of it's steam. There's a great amount of logical failures, the script isn't nearly strong enough to support everything by the end, and it's fairly xenophobic at parts (definitely plays up the 'Foreigners are tricky little bastards who only want to deceive and hurt you' angle). The action, which is the important part of a movie like this, can be pretty intense (for a PG-13 movie), but it all moves in such a by-the-numbers manner that you can pretty much guess how it's all going to go down (save for one rather unexpected gunshot).

In other words, it almost feels like your basic action movie (subgenre: out for revenge), one that, in most situations would either be direct-to-DVD or cleaned up enough to get a small theatrical run. Good for a fair amount of enjoyment, then quickly forgotten.

I say it almost feels like that, because this has one extra thing going for it: Liam Neeson.

Put simply, he makes this work. With Liam latching onto the material with such ferocity and determination, he makes every punch hit harder and every threat seem scarier (he certainly gives a hard edge to the little speech in the aforementioned trailer, which makes the whole thing work so well). He glides through the movie, kicking more ass than one would think possible, and always doing it with the slick (yet hardened) grace that Liam is known for.

It is a little odd for an actor of his caliber to be in something like this (as I said, it's not the strongest of movies, and in more than one spot he's held back because of that), but this is something that's good for Liam to have under his belt. It gives him some more versatility, and steps him up from the kind fatherly figure that he's been stuck with for the past few movies (think The Phantom Menace or Gangs of New York), and shows that he can lay the smack down with the best of them.

Overall, it's a fun little action movie that never strives to be anything more than just that. Liam does an excellent job (as always), the hits are tough, and the torture scene works wonders. Definitely something that's short, sweet, and completely recommended.

I now await the eventual teaming up of Liam Neeson and Viggo Mortensen as hard-worked fathers who need to kill everyone in Jersey to rescue their families.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Figz7rOnKXA