Brian (Liam Neeson), a former counter-intelligence operative and now a divorced retiree, sips beer with his old comrades, works part-time at a Los Angeles security firm, argues with his ex-wife, and dotes on his seventeen-year-old daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). Like any intelligence officer who has seen the dark side of reality, Brian is always looking for security breaches and immediately goes on alert when his daughter flies to Europe for vacation. His concern turns out to be justified: in Paris, the girl is kidnapped by the Albanian mafia and sold into sex slavery. Brian has only a few hours to fly across the ocean, free his beloved child, fill the villains with lead, and punch the right people in the face.
To the timid American at heart, Europe has always seemed like a criminal amusement park, where locals with dog heads speak an incomprehensible language and dream of profiting from dollars. In connection with “Taken” (2008) and the city of Paris – the most depressing, as you know, security breach for American citizens abroad – “Frantic” (1988) with Harrison Ford comes to mind, one of the best action films on this topic. But Ford’s character was more of a passive victim, an unfortunate ordinary man forced to show courage in extreme circumstances. And the spectacular mess that Neeson’s character makes in the French capital is more like an act of international retribution, as if an American battleship entered the Seine and began firing directly at the romantic embankments for the fact that these cowards did not support the war in Iraq. The concern of the local special services, who have already established a tender relationship with the Albanian mafia and dream of quickly expelling this guy from the country, is understandable. And they also get punched in the face.
The Surprise of a French Film
The most surprising thing is that “Taken” is a French film, conceived and produced by Luc Besson, a European film manufacturer who plays by Hollywood rules and continues to promote his main find – Pierre Morel, an excellent cameraman (“War” (2007), “The Transporter” (2002)) and a self-taught director who shot “District 13” (2004) for him. Just imagine how predictably boring the story with American hostages would have turned out if some big studio with a bloated staff and well-thought-out marketing had taken it on the other side of the Atlantic. Here, every three minutes the screen is decorated with some kind of impudent, virtuoso violence, the crunch of cervical vertebrae, the squeal of brakes, the roar of shots, and the joyful absence of political correctness. And all, note, is packed into some hour and a half – the good old seventies format, respecting the patience of the audience. They also did not forget about food for thought: the hero, using methods of deduction, finds the Albanian villains practically from scratch, clinging, like Sherlock Holmes, to a thread stuck in a broken mirror.
Liam Neeson’s Transformation
But the main surprise of the film was still Neeson, whose unique appearance can be exploited in the range from Irish saints to evil schizophrenics, but for some reason, Neeson has been more lucky with saints in the last ten years. The detective “Under Suspicion” (1991), which was released even before “Schindler’s List” (1993), seems to have been almost the last full-fledged thriller in his career. “Taken” made me remember that this phlegmatic Irishman is a real action star: when a person with such a kind, thoughtful face hurts people for an hour and a half, this in itself is a great show.
This weekend, you need to go to see such a show not to helpless American thrillers, but to a French thriller about Americans.