85 - Taken

    A retired government agent goes on a personal mission to rescue his daughter after she is kidnapped in Europe by a slavery ring.
    This has a remarkable following for a straight-ahead action movie.  Liam Neeson seems like an interesting choice to lead this type of movie, so I had to give it a shot.  It's not bad, but it's not as fantastic as the fans have made it out to be.
    Most of the first 25 minutes are spent on setting the plot up, and establishing that Neeson is kind of obsessed with his daughter.  This is fine, but it doesn't come across as being a normal type of fatherly interest.  He's already focused in a way that seems pathological, and that might be intentional.
    Once the story is set, Neeson travels to Paris to pick up her trail.  He winds up taking on an Albanian mob, with their fingers in drugs, prostitution, slavery, and so forth.  Since this is the meat of the movie, it's fairly entertaining.   But it has this strange feeling to a lot of it.  Like Neeson is not making the smartest moves that he could.  In particular, the first person that he finds in Paris is the person who could easily have helped him the most.  The first thing he does is try to beat the information out of him.  He does this in public, without any concern that he might be calling attention to his help.
    There's a point later in the movie when he is willing to shoot (not to kill, of course) an innocent person in an effort to get information out of another person.  This is an unusual move, and it makes us a bit less sympathetic to his mission.

    After watching this, Cathy brought up the lack of development.  This is true.  There aren't any character-building moments.  But this made me think of similar parent-revenge stories.  First, I thought of Hardcore, which of course, makes me think of 8MM.  Then Last House on the Left.  which goes back to The Virgin Spring.  Of course, Last House and The Virgin Spring both deal with a child who has clearly been killed, while Hardcore and 8MM leave the viewer with an uncertain status.  I wonder how this difference changes the audience perception of the story.  Or if the death is left uncertain for most of the story, then is revealed at the end, does that justify prior actions that would have been in bad taste?

    There's one aspect to this movie that leaves a bad impression.  Neesom doesn't seem to care much about freeing, or helping, the other girls in captivity.  He isn't interest in breaking up their ring, only in getting his daughter.  In fact, he states this explicitly on a few occasions.  This doesn't feel right.