I watched Taken a few weeks ago. I'd heard it was pretty bad, but I like Liam Neeson, and I was looking for something light and action-y to numb my brain for awhile. The movie wasn't as quite as terrible as I'd heard it was -- it was more of a run of the mill Bourne rip-off, but it really didn't work well as a movie.

I'd mark this for spoilers, but I don't think any of this CAN be spoiled.

The story, as you may or may not know, is that Liam Neeson plays an ex-CIA black ops operative who quits his job so that he can move closer to his teenage daughter, who's living with his shrewish ex-wife and the ex-wife's smarmy, rich new husband. We know the step-dad is no good because he has the temerity to upstage Neeson's gift of a karaoke machine for his daughter by giving her a pony! Do teenage girls even want ponies? Neeson's karaoke machine was supposed to be the thoughtful gift, because at some time in the past, maybe when she was six, she expressed interest in being a singer. Even if she still does want to be a singer, which at no time she seems interested in, that's a bit like buying the video game Rock Star for an aspiring songwriter.


Of course, we learn, Neeson really wasn't around much as a dad, too busy off, as he tells his daughter, "stopping bad things from happening." Oh. So he was with the Good Guys Department of the CIA; the Keeping Brutal South American Dictators Department was up on six. Anyway, now he's really trying to make amends. He's retired and living in a crap apartment all to be near his little girl.

His ex-CIA buddies talk him into working a one-shot security gig for a pop star, and he uses the opportunity to ask her for advice about his daughter's (apparently undesired) singing career. The pop star blows him off, as all women apparently do until they see how much they need his big strong Righteous Fury, which conveniently comes just a scene later when he defends her from a whacko fan(?) with a knife(?). So thankful is she that she gives him the card of her vocal coach, which is a bit like giving an aspiring basketball player a copy of the rulebook. How about the number of your agent, honey? Or your recording studio?

The daughter finally asks Daddy Destruction to lunch, and he eagerly goes with vocal coach info in hand, ready to swoop in and fix the his daughter's life before knowing anything about it. Unfortunately for him, her shrewish mom is there, too. Ambush! Code red! This is just like that damned Bay of Pigs thing.

Apparently the daughter wants to go to Paris with her nineteen year old friend to, um, study art and stuff. "You like art?" he asks, bewildered. Not really, Dad, but at least you're starting to ask. "Um, totally!" He's against the trip. She'd be unchaperoned, alone with her friend and her friend's cousins, in a strange country. This seems like a pretty reasonable objection to me, actually, and since Mommy's new husband is loaded, you'd think at least one of the three of them could go along or something. But nevermind that, Momma wants her daughter gone for the summer so she can get some spa-time in, so she guilts Neeson into agreeing to "think about it." He tries to calm his daughter's protests by giving her the vocal coach info, but she'll have none of it. Apparently, not having needed his violence in her service yet, she's blowing him off, too. Damn bitches.

The ex-wife's guilt trip works, though, and eventually he relents, under some conditions (like calling him every day) that the daughter totally ignores. He and the ex-wife see her off at the airport, where he is enraged to learn from the mother that she's actually going to be following U2 around Europe. I'm no parent, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't let my kid do that. Follow U2, that is. If they're going to blow a summer being a groupie, they can do it for a better band than that. But it's too late to argue, she's on her way down to the gate, so all he can do is sulk in his crappy apartment and wait for her phone call and dream of that one day, that one beautiful day when those bitches will need him!

And what a coincidence, that day is today! For at the airport, they're spotted by cunning white slavers (wow!), one of whom smooth-talks his way into splitting a cab-ride with them so he can find out where they live and learn that they are traveling alone and unchaperoned. Completely. See, nineteen year old friend lied, her cousins aren't even there! Wooo! Par-tay!

It just so happens that the daughter gets an irate call from her dad, wondering if she'd landed, just as the slavers bust in and grab her friend. She's conveniently able to see this through an interior window thanks to the quirks of Parisian architecture, and expert CIA dad leaps into action...telling her to hide under the bed. Dude, is that where you hid when Qaddafi was coming? Under the bed? Cuz I'm seriously worried about our nation's security.

Of course they find her, and her dad tells her to shout out everything she can about them. She shouts out that one of them has a tattoo -- yeah, that's a big help! -- and the phone picks up a little foreign dialog, which Neeson is able to have his CIA buddies translate as Albanian. Fucking Albanians. Where's Milosevic when you need him?

So this is their modus operandi. They find dim-witted looking tourists and share cab-rides with them to later abduct them, addict them to drugs, and sell them into the sex trade. Seems like a bad business model to me. Do you know how expensive Paris cab rates are? I'd doubt they'd break even.

The whole idea is pretty silly. You can nab runaways and druggies all you want, but you start grabbing wealthy tourists from western countries, there's gonna be a shitstorm. We had one little chick go missing in Aruba and half the newsmedia went berserk. You're gonna have the State Department, the UN, Interpol, the French police, the Paris Office of Tourism, and the damned Chamber of Commerce out to get you. Hey, I'm no naif. Bad shit happens. But rule number one in running an illicit business is you don't fuck with taxpayers. Paris is a summer town! It needs summer euros! But those Albanians don't care. They're loco, man! The craziest of the crazy! We're told even the Russians are afraid of them.

Neeson goes into combat mode, and the rest is predictable. He gets step-dad to get him a private jet to Paris (apparently that weeny is good for something), where he soon spots the airport hood who runs away and gets hit by a truck. Fuck, that was a good lead, too. So he's left to hassle a random Albanian streetwalker, then hire a translator to listen in on her pimps to pick up the location of their gang. This is kind of a strange pattern the movie follows -- Neeson kills anyone with any useful information, and then bumbles onto the next piece of information by a combination violence and sheer luck. No wonder we could never keep Haiti under control.

He manages to infiltrate a storing place for the girls where he kills everybody but rescues an enslaved prostitute with his daughter's jacket (at least he remembered to keep a lead alive this time.) He detoxes her so she'll tell him where the gang leaders are, and she does, and we don't really know what happens to her after that. Of course, there were a whole lot of other people's daughters back at that slave hideout that he didn't rescue, but I guess we're not meant to think of that.

He goes to the gang leaders and kills most of them, too. Now, it's a bit of a cliche that in action movies, the hero's shots usually land, while the bad guys repeatedly miss. But this movie takes this to new levels. Every single shot of his hits the target exactly where he wants. Every shot of theirs, no matter how close the range and no matter how many of them there are, misses. Sometimes, it's almost like that Pulp Fiction scene without the irony. God really did make the bullets go around him!

He's got a French spook friend who turns out not to be much of a friend, who doesn't want him killing people all over Paris to find his daughter. We eventually learn that the French spook is so unconcerned about white slavers because he's on the take. This may be the very first film to combine French xenophobia (oh no, Albanians!) with anti-French xenophobia (damn cheese-eating surrender monkeys!) It's quite remarkable when you think about it.

Throughout the movie, there's this uncomfortable sexist vibe going on. Not macho sexist, like Die Hard, but purity ball sexist, as in, this is a quest to protect his daughter's hymen. See, she's a virgin, while her nineteen year old friend like TOTALLY did it. By a remarkable coincidence, that friend dies being overdosed on drugs in a brothel, while the pure daughter is spared that and, quite miraculously, is passed from slaver to slaver without ever being touched.

Eventually, she gets sent to this super high class sex slave auction with bidders in dark windowed rooms viewing the merchandise. What is it about movies that are supposed to show the dark underbellies of society that never end in the depressing, soulless, half-dead-in-the-gutter places that we all know they go to, but instead end up in some perverse high society? Eyes Wide Shut, showing the darker side of sex in Paris, ends in some silly dress up club. 8mm, about snuff films, ends with some inane prattling avant-garde auteur. To me, the gutter version is a hell of a lot scarier. Maybe because it happens a hell of a lot more.

In any case, it all works out quite conveniently here. By getting sent to the high class auction, the daughter's veins and virginity are spared, which is thankful, because all Dad's bad deeds would have been wasted if they hadn't. Apparently, it's not heroic to merely pull your daughter out of a horrific situation and comfort her back to sanity. You've got to get to her before she's tainted.

Dad works his way in and tries to buy her, but that fails, so he kills everyone, but she's taken by some sheik (Where's Saddam when you need him?) to his boat to be deflowered, and Daddy gets there just in time to off him. The daughter is so grateful that she agrees to go meet the pop star and take a lesson from her vocal coach. I guess when Daddy saves you from being raped and sold into prostitution, you have to go along with whatever dream he thinks you wanted to have.

There's this whole male revenge/protection fantasy playing out amidst a stew of sexual control and xenophobia and the very basest of upper middle class fears, and as distasteful as those elements are, they really do make the film more interesting. But where the film really goes wrong is that it simply isn't violent enough.

It's a funny thing for me to say. I'm not a big fan of movie violence. I'm not against it, either. I view it the same way I view special effects: if it helps the story, it's good, and if it doesn't, it's just a distraction. But here the final shootout is so anti-climactic, and all the ones leading up to it are pretty tame. Sure, he kills a lot of people, but not as John McClain on a slow day. A few of them are violent kills, but not shockingly so.

There is some bit of appeal to this fantasy of loved ones in peril, and the hero meting out harsh retribution to everyone in his way. (Sort of like The Missing right up until the part Ron Howard decided to descend into quasi-spiritual Native American hokum bullshit.) But the only way a film can really do anything interesting with that is to push the limits.

If I'd made this film, it would have started out "Aw, yeah, get him, hero!" and slowly kept upping the ante until it crossed that line for each member of the audience, when slowly they started to recoil in horror and see it's not so much fun anymore. I mean, if that's the premise, he'll do ANYTHING to get his daughter back, let's see him do ANYTHING! There's no thrill in watching a father merely file a missing persons police report, and this movie doesn't really go that much further, in the context of the genre. The whole point is to see him doing something we wouldn't do!

I wouldn't even do it as a statement against violence. If you need a movie to tell you violence is bad, you're in pretty sad shape already. But I do think, perhaps from many Hitchcock viewings, that most movies just aren't much fun unless they can make you squirm a little. At least it would be provoking. And at least it would keep us from getting dulled by routine death after routine death.