Action thriller “Taken,” starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace and Olivier Rabourdin, has managed to amaze critics by being a straight-forward product of its genre, which lacks all the elements that make a movie of this type a bad one, despite all the efforts to really „thrill.”
Directed by Pierre Morel on a script written by Robert Mark Kamen and Luc Besson, „Taken” is able to delicately sway focus between characters and their actions and also knows when to concentrate only on the underlying causes that give rise to both the characters’ personalities and the things they choose to do.
In the movie, Liam Neeson portrays Brian, a nice man whose sole purpose is to rekindle his relationship with his daughter, who has been giving him the cold shoulder because he ruined his marriage and pushed everybody out of his life by being a workaholic.
Nevertheless, Brian now wants to make amends and revive the connection with his teenage daughter, in an attempt to go on to build a strong and meaningful bond with her.
The father-figure trying to reconcile with his offspring plotline intermingles, as expected, with another one that entails that Brian is a former CIA agent, which not quite surprisingly further entails that the daughter is in her turn taken away by an international band of evil-doers.
Even though the storyline is predictable, both the directors and the writers have done an exquisite job of compensating for that in the way scenes unfurl and small details that add up to the brooding feeling of increasing tension.
The girl is kidnapped from her apartment while she’s on the phone, the conversation having the role of a catalysts for the audience’s feelings of fear and anxiety to know what is going to happen next.
Moreover, the filmmakers have made proof of their ability to elude every action thriller cliche and build their movie entirely on the idea of negating those cliches, which each scene that people expect to come from the one they’ve just seen having been turned into the exact opposite so as to keep viewers on the edge of their seats craving more twists and novelty.
The method is a good advertising ruse, too, since the other movies of the genre, all following the beaten track and taking one after the other, pale by comparison with a production that chose to deny everything that has stood the test of time and to put forward a new set of values and guidelines.
Liam Neeson, 56, is best known for his roles as Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and as Qui-Gon Jinn in George Lucas' Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, while he was also featured in other hit movies such as Darkman, Rob Roy, Kingdom of Heaven, Batman Begins and The Chronicles of Narnia film series.
In addition, his work includes having portrayed several characters based on real people like Michael Collins and Alfred Kinsey, whereas he is also scheduled to play President Abraham Lincoln in a biographical film directed by Steven Spielberg.
