Word: daughters
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...second best part of Taken is a phone message the movie's hero, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), leaves for the man who has just kidnapped his 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). "I don't know who you are," Bryan says, his voice icy with a strong man's resolve. "I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare...
...Taken could have been a real movie, and a good one. It spices its torture-porn premise - a man trying to save his daughter from being peddled as the tender meat in a white-slave ring - with Neeson's stolid, solid presence. But the film promises so much more than it delivers that by the end, I felt like registering a complaint with the Obama Administration's consumer-protection squad...
...nothing-at-all fellow. An indifferent husband to Lenore (Famke Janssen, this time looking less than her usual obscenely fabulous), who's remarried and can't stand him, Bryan is trying to redeem himself as a family man by paying extra attention to his daughter...
...These roiling undercurrents are hard to miss, but the movie and Neeson seem unaware of them. What they do understand are the conventions of the genre. And one is that when an action hero warns his daughter about imminent danger - say, the potential perils of spending the summer in Paris with a classmate - Papa knows whereof he preacheth. Perhaps some angel has whispered to him that if the girls did just go safely museum-hopping, it wouldn't be a Luc Besson movie...
...Morel hadn't stranded his cast in dialogue scenes with lumpy rhythms and action choreography that has a low plausibility factor, I'd guess that Taken means to be a critique of a man as fascinated by his daughter's endangered purity as her predators are - and, by extension, of the thriller genre's obsessive hero. Back in the '70s, a cop film mined the similarities between the man with the badge and the criminal he hunted. That was The French Connection, whose wary sympathy for, and exposé of, the cop played by Gene Hackman won the movie...