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It may be strange to say that what impressed me the most about Taken is how utterly simple and straightforward it is. After all, here’s a movie that, at least tangentially, takes on issues of parental neglect, forced slavery and prostitution, torture as effective interrogation, and international government corruption. And yet, thanks largely to Liam Neeson’s white-knuckle performance, the only thing that matters is whether or not he will find his daughter before his 96-hour window of opportunity (referred to by one of the characters as the amount of time before a kidnap victim in the sex trade becomes impossible to locate) slams shut.
The film opens with a brief diversion for Bryan Mills (Neeson), who has recently retired from government service as an agent who, as he tells his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), prevented “bad things from happening.” Taking a job protecting a teen pop star, he makes it clear that his number-one priority is to make up for lost time with Kim. He even manages to secure the pop star’s gratitude, along with a chance for her vocal coach and manager to interview Kim, who dreams of being a singer.
Before he can deliver the present of a lifetime, however, he’s blindsided by Kim’s request to spend some time with a friend in Paris. He disapproves of the trip, but his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) guilt-trips him into agreeing to let her go. Within hours of Kim’s arrival in Paris, all of Bryan’s fears are realized when both girls are kidnapped by an Albanian prostitution ring that specializes in selling captive young women to wealthy international businessmen.
Beginning with this scene—a brilliantly executed sequence where Bryan calmly talks his daughter through what’s happening over a cell phone—the film picks up a tense momentum that lasts through the final showdown over Kim’s fate. The camera lingers on Neeson’s face while he listens to his daughter’s struggle over the phone’s speaker, and it’s amazing how much emotion the actor conveys without saying a word or even noticeably moving a muscle.
And that’s what makes the movie work. Because Neeson does such a superb job of investing the audience in Bryan’s need to do whatever he can to rescue his daughter, we’re able to follow him to some extremely dark places. At one point, he puts a bullet in the arm of the wife of a man who likely has information that he needs—a woman who, the movie suggests, was in no way complicit in or knowledgeable of the crime. Even torture-works icon Jack Bauer of TV’s 24 might have had some trouble with that one.
Normally, I have some discomfort with revenge narratives that gloss over the hero’s less savory actions, but this one does such an effective job of putting the viewer into Bryan’s desperation and his methodical approach that objections like this seem to miss the point. This isn’t a man who’s fighting for country or principle or anything so vague. Bryan Mills does terrible things because he wants his daughter back safe, and it’s as powerful an emotion as it is visceral in this film.
Any film like this runs the risk of fetishizing revenge, but that’s something that Taken manages to sidestep, if not entirely evade. It’s a highly enjoyable action-thriller that, by staying focused on its singular premise, evokes genuine emotion without succumbing to violent spectacle.
