Taken

Your arrogance offends me. It is proof positive that you can still have a basic and formulaic genre piece and the multiplex crowd will forgive it the sins of film making. For here we have a revenge thriller that is over reliant on a ream of contrivances? The kind that people scoff at when horror pictures not wanting to be serious get screamed down for?. There is also some pretty poor acting performances on show, the usually reliable Famke Jansen looks lost when asked to show emotion, Maggie Grace needs to go back to acting school, whilst some of the French actors on show give French actors a bad name. However the true saving grace in the movie, outside of some serious revenge fuelled torture sequences, is Liam Neeson in the lead role of Bryan Mills. Charismatic and believable as a father hell bent on finding the one thing worthwhile that he has in his life, it's only here that Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen's uneven writing gets any sort of urgency to go with the tidily put together action sequences. Taken is an enjoyable film if taken within the context of its genre, and for sure the subject matter of skin trafficking is a noteworthy plot, but no one can surely deny it doesn't have a shallow core and honestly isn't giving anything new to a pretty stagnated formula... By the by, the thrills ensure popcorn pleasing pleasures and thus it's rated as such. 7/10