To be generous, it’s far-fetched to a fault. Turning the tables on master fiends, police officials and their families, ransacking Paris for clues, Bryan ends up in a shootout on a luxury yacht on the Seine only minutes before Kim is to be raped by an Arab sheik who looks like Jabba the Hutt. Each new victim (including some of France’s leading power players) only piques the simmering rage of a vengeful parent, and we all know that a dangerous secret agent with a mission makes for panic in the streets.
In one scene, when he fails to get the right answer from a man strapped to a chair in the middle of a brutal interrogation, he electrocutes him, filling the room with smoke, fire and the smell of burning flesh.
And there is no limit to his ability to tap international phone lines, spark the ignition in foreign cars without keys and find new ways to torture and kill his victims. Equipped with Uzis, knives, swords and even an electric chair, Bryan works without official supervision or an expense account, yet never seems to run out of steam or cash. And I will kill you.” He does, of course, but not before he slam-dunks his way through the City of Light, turning it into darkness. He may be a has-been, but within 96 hours he’s torn down everything in Paris with his bare hands except the Eiffel Tower.įirst, he leaves a message on the kidnappers’ cell phone, which just happens to be lying under the bed where his daughter is hiding: “I will look for you. When his virginal 17-year-old (huh? In L.A.?) embarks with her girlfriend on a whirlwind tour following the rock group U2 across Europe and, within hours of her arrival in Paris, gets kidnapped by Albanian white slavers, Bryan shifts into demolition mode and takes no prisoners.
But old habits die hard, and Bryan has forgotten none of the special skills he learned from his years with the C.I.A.-a knowledge of weapons, wiretaps, deciphering secret codes, scaling buildings like Batman and wiping out anything that gets in his way without regret-if he suddenly needs them. All he does now is grill steaks for his buddies and work occasional security jobs like guarding pop stars at rock concerts. So Bryan retired, moved to Los Angeles to make up for the frayed relationship with his estranged daughter Kim and sacrificed his own career to be near her. Bryan once devoted so much concentration and energy to his job as a “preventer” (“I prevented bad things from happening”) that his wife (a wasted Famke Janssen, who usually plays these roles herself) left him for a rich California businessman and took their daughter with them. In the violent, churning and laughably derivative action bruiser Taken, he’s a suave, power-knuckled and once-lethal secret agent named Bryan Mills who, in truth, is just as mean as 007 but maybe slightly more human (he’s an ex-husband, as well as a parent who loves his child unconditionally). Liam Neeson was up for-but never got to play-James Bond, and now he’s getting even.
Starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen