Word: film
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...Befitting a B-minus exploitation film, that steely speech is in the 30-sec. TV spot that sold Taken as a smart thriller and that will probably land the movie at No. 1 for the weekend. But if a movie's high points are a quick smack of carnage and a steely speech that everyone's already seen in the trailer, you know it must be January. That's the time of year when no film is bad enough to go direct to DVD, and studios dump their slag on a public eager to flee from all those high-minded...
...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...
...Silly me: I'd been looking forward to Taken, in part because it was directed by Pierre Morel, whose previous film was District 13, a fast-'n'-brutal, half-classic crime movie highlighting the art of parkour. That's the working-class-thug form of gymnastics that sends athletic young men hurtling over roofs, through transoms and down staircases, all without the aid of a digital art brush. Morel, a cinematographer directing his first feature, kept things moving and snarling with a scuzzy brio and made expert use of the artless screen presence of the leading men (one a stunt...
...Both Morel movies were produced and co-written by Luc Besson, who's a one-man French film industry. He earned his early rep as a writer-director with Subway, a vivacious crime melodrama, then made the Hollywood-influenced thrillers La Femme Nikita and The Professional (which introduced Natalie Portman) and the Bruce Willis sci-fi hit The Fifth Element. Rarely directing movies anymore, he's produced nearly 70 of them this decade, most set in Paris, many in English, including the Transporter series and a couple of Jet Li action adventures. Besson is Hollywood in another...
...curiosity that makes them idiots. Before they've even gotten out of Charles de Gaulle Airport, they have blithely given their Paris address to a suspiciously friendly fellow who, in short order, dispatches some rough types there to kidnap the girls. The second message of this French-made film: Don't trust the French...