Action Movie Review: Taken (2008)

Title: Taken
Year 2008
Director: Pierre Morell
With: Liam Neeson, Famke Jannsen, Leland Orser, David Warshofsky, Xander Berkeley, Maggie Grace
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Country of origin: France
English language
Rating: PG-13
Duration: 90 min.

Source: filmaffinity.com/us/film555719.html

The remembered Leslie Nielsen was an actor who dedicated most of his career to serious or dramatic roles in film and TV until his participation in the satirical film Airplane! (1982) which opened up the possibility of dedicating himself to humor. Although other "serious" actors such as Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack and Peter Graves, to mention the best known, participated in Airplane!, Nielsen was undoubtedly the one who benefited the most, starting a second career as a comedy actor with, among others, The Naked Gun trilogy (1988-1994).

Something very similar happened more recently with Liam Neeson and today's movie. Neeson, a fifty-year-old who until then had dedicated himself mostly to dramatic films such as Schindler's List (1993) or The Mission (1986), begins a new stage in his career with Taken (2008), now as an action hero, at the age of that others tend to opt for more relaxed roles, as a father, grandfather or mentor to a thirty-year-old protagonist.

Of course we are talking here about the so-called "Hollywood magic" and not about real life. It's not that Neeson had decided to quit acting and pursue a life of adventure, but just to participate in action movies, putting his face up so that stuntmen put their lives on the line and make him look good on the screen. Still, it's often harder for an older actor to convince audiences of his fictional prowess. Think, for example, of John Wayne in McQ (1974) or the last two or three films by Roger Moore as James Bond in the mid-1980s.

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And yet, thanks to the expert production of Luc Besson, who had already undertaken similar work with Jean Reno in Leon (1994) and with Jason Statham in The Transporter (2002), the bet paid off and from then on, Liam Neeson starred in, among others, The A-Team (2010), Unknown (2011), The Gray (2011), Non-Stop (2014), Run All Night (2015), The Commuter (2018), Honest Thief (2020) , The Marksman (2021) and the inevitable sequels to Taken. Not only that, but he inaugurated his own subgenre, which has also been visited by other actors in a similar situation, such as Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, or, more recently, Bob Odenkirk, and has served to revive Keanu Reeves' career thanks to the John Wick film series.

Perhaps part of the success of the film is based on the fact that it appeals to the visceral fear that every father (or mother) has, that the gypsies will come, or the bogeyman, or the organ traffickers, or whoever, and take your baby. (In this case, a teenage girl in her early 30s, but the basic idea remains.) It's also a payback movie, and I'm not just talking about the slave traders who end up choosing the wrong adversary, but all those that in the course of the film they bully, trash, belittle and mistreat Bryan Mills (Neeson), including his wife and daughter, who lie to him, cheat on him and treat him like a moron and end up reaping what they sow when his concerns are fulfilled.

Taken is part of the "you've messed with the wrong man" subgenre, which is as old as Hollywood and includes superficially disparate titles like Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) with Spencer Tracy, or First Blood (1982), the first film from the Rambo franchise. Here, a gang of slavers kidnaps the protagonist's 30-year-old teenage daughter, who has just finished high school and is still a virgin (yes, at 30). One of them makes the mistake of making fun of him and wishing him good luck, and that ends up being the last straw and it helps Mills, a former CIA agent, to do justice and rescue his teenage daughter before her 31st birthday. :)

Source: filmaffinity.com/us/film555719.html

There's action, but it's the kind of choreographed and edited action to make a 50-year-old actor who's never done the chores look good. In any case, we already said that this is the strength of Luc Besson's productions, they always have good fight coordinators and risk scenes. There is also at least one torture scene that will stick with the viewer after the end titles.

I liked? Yes, in 2008. Today, after so many imitations and sequels, Taken's price has dropped considerably, but I still keep it in my movie collection, only the first one, not the sequels and from time to time I revisit it.

Posted using CineTV