Taken

Taken (2008)

 
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John Wilson
Updated November 30, 2024
Taken

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Movie Overview | Taken (2008)

Taken is a 2008 French action-thriller film directed by Pierre Morel and written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. It stars Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, David Warshofsky, Katie Cassidy, Holly Valance and Famke Janssen. In the film, Bryan Mills, an ex-CIA officer, sets to track down his teenage daughter Kim and her best friend Amanda after they are kidnapped by Albanian human trafficking terrorists while travelling in France during a vacation.

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1 review
Overall rating
 
2.8
Entertainment Factor
 
3.0(1)
Story
 
3.0(1)
Actors Performance
 
2.0(1)
Cinematography
 
3.0(1)
Sound Track
 
3.0(1)
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Action and Thills Galore
(Updated: January 04, 2025)
Overall rating
 
2.8
Entertainment Factor
 
3.0
Story
 
3.0
Actors Performance
 
2.0
Cinematography
 
3.0
Sound Track
 
3.0
Liam Neeson plays ex-spook Bryan Mills, who is on the phone with his 17-year-old daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), when she and her friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) are abducted by members of what proves to be a group of Albanian traders in gullible young women. After some histrionics from Bryan’s ex-wife and Kim’s mother, Lenore (Famke Janssen), the action shifts rapidly from Los Angeles to Paris.

With subsequent developments, disbelief has to be not so much suspended as hanged by the neck until dead. The infinitely resourceful Bryan races around the city, extracting information from the most tenuous of clues as he tracks down his daughter’s persecutors, dealing out death and vengeance along the way.

All his actions, including a particularly gruesome torture sequence, are justified in the name of “the family,” a view adopted even by a corrupt French police official to explain away his own villainy.

Some of Bryan’s escapes are of the “with-one-bound-he-was-free” variety — so implausible as to be comic, though without the tongue-in-cheek irony of the James Bond movies.

Neeson fully earns his crust in his role as nonstop action man. Required by the script to limit his range to two basic expressions — passionate concern for his daughter and implacable wrath for her abductors — he manages on occasion to hint at vulnerabilities and flaws underlying the character.

Janssen and Grace, however, are trapped in two-dimensional roles, while the numerous bad guys are so briefly developed and so rapidly dispatched that the press kit does not consider it necessary to specify the actors’ names. The villains, with few exceptions, are Easterners of varying degrees of odiousness, and the movie is unlikely to find admirers in Albania and the Arab world.

If you like a no thinking action movie with a lot of violence, this movie is for you.

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