By Jo Bowers
This review contains spoilers.
Never has a tag line been more apt. ‘The time for revenge has come’. But of course it has, and why not when you are a hapless, doting father whose perfectly spoilt hyperactive teenager has been kidnapped and thrown into a French sex trafficking ring. This very basic premise is the ninety-three-minutes that make up Taken, nothing more nothing less. These ninety-three-minutes are so straightforward that the tag line really should have read “time flies when you’re killing people with no police interference”. Not so snappy perhaps. Revenge is sweet indeed but as far as Taken goes it is sweet for all the wrong reasons.
As a retired CIA spy Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is trying desperately, very desperately, to reacquaint himself with his estranged daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). We are told countless times that he was not always the daughter-loving man he is now and that he has crossed America to seek that father/daughter relationship every spoilt girl dreams of. In an attempt to kick start this effort he swings a singing lesson with Kim’s favourite pop star played by ex-‘Neighbours’ star Holly Vallance, and it only get’s stranger. Kim’s friend Amanda upstages this with an offer of a summer in Paris. So it begins. After mother and daughter devour him with a female manipulation that even a preying mantis would wince at he agrees to let Kim travel underage to France. However, whilst calling her Daddy to let him know she has safely arrived, Kim witnesses her effortlessly stupid travel buddy Amanda (Katy Cassidy) being ‘taken’ by masked men across the way. It’s only a matter of time before Kim herself is dragged from her hiding place whilst Daddy listens on hearing his beloved daughter yelling descriptions of the men. Clever, eh!
What ensues is where it all gets rather strange. To use some jargon, the reason it fails is because the ‘complicating action’ is, well, not complicated. Liam Neeson uses various ninja moves, kills about thirty people without the cops noticing, buys his daughter back from a sex traffic ring for a lot of money, and goes home. Bryan Mills is a protagonist with absolutely no obstacles detaining him from his dramatic goal and it doesn’t help that his performance is worse than Nicolas Cage and Matthew McConaughey on a bad day.
There are other reasons it doesn’t work, predominantly the characters and narrative. Surely the desired effect of the two sprightly young American girls being beaten and kidnapped into the sex trade wasn’t for viewers to cry ‘sweet!’ as I did. They really are all incredibly dull and excruciatingly annoying and when one holds not a morsel of empathy or sympathy for any of the films characters, you have a big problem. The scenes between Neeson and Grace are so completely forced and over dramatized that it really is hard to want either of them to do well. Secondly, I take it to heart when directors use dialogue like a bludgeoning tool and we are continuously bludgeoned throughout Taken.
I suspect this happens when a film is directed at American audiences, that subtlety and panache are left in the cold and instead drama is spelt out in very clear l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e.
Finally, on a more serious note, despite the ending being tragically obvious, it is also quite revolting. For a seventeen-year-old girl who has been continually drugged with opium, raped repeatedly, been beaten and sold for sex, Kim returns home astonishingly healthy, laughing and once again shouting ‘’Mommy” in a voice that induces a nervous twitch. She meets her hero Sheerah (Holly Vallance) and is invited into her mansion house. An amazing recovery by any standard of sex slave. Clearly the cure for this unimaginable trauma is a vocal lesson with your favourite pop star. Yes, this film is a matter of omissions to create a pathetic fantasy for fatherless girls everywhere. I am one of them but this silliness only left me wondering if Bryan Mills will ever get the multiple first degree murder charges he earnt during this appalling film.
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August 5, 2009 at 7:22 am
Hayles
This film was indeed ‘appalling.’
(This is what happens when you get a 25 year old actress to play a 17 year old girl…)
You say, however, that ‘for a seventeen-year-old girl who has been continually drugged with opium, raped repeatedly, been beaten and sold for sex, Kim returns home astonishingly healthy, laughing and once again shouting ‘’Mommy” in a voice that induces a nervous twitch.’
Whilst I agree that Kim’s lack of grief for her friend (she returns looking as if she’s just got back from summer camp) made me conclude that she was a total bitch, she wasn’t beaten or raped repeatedly. The whole reason Kim survived and her friend did not was because Kim was a virgin, and this was why she was sold at such a high price. Her virginity essentially saved her life (a nice little moral nod to the American audience, there…)
It was this element of the way the narrative played out that made it so uncomfortable to watch, for me; it was no longer that Bryan was trying to find his daughter, but that it was a race against time to preserve her virginity (as his running to find her is intercut with scenes of her being prepared in white clothes etc. with the other girls bought by the same guy). What started as quite gritty – the scenes when Bryan finds the first girls in that den, drugged up and in rooms, were really harrowing and difficult to watch – then turned into a ‘I need to preserve my daughter’s purity’ charade. At the beginning, I thought the film could really raise awareness about the horrific nature of the sex trade, but by the end it became about this one (incredibly ungrateful) girl.
The whole thing was ridiculous, and the way she bounces off to her mummy at the end, hair all neat in a Gossip Girl headband (if I remember correctly, or maybe I’ve just imagined this icing-on-the-cake detail as evidence of her annoyingness) when she arrives off the plane just made me want to slap her; she is as emotionally crippled as her manipulative mother.
I honestly cannot believe that Liam Neeson got involved in this. Dreadful.