'Taken' on a guilty-pleasure ride

by CJaye | February 2, 2009 at 07:35 am

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To me it is obvious that Human Sex Trafficking and Human Trafficking has made an impact on the United States and other countries. Actors are making more and more movies about this serious crime. This is a review of the new movie "TAKEN" it came out yeaterday. If you haven't had the chance to watch any of the Human Sex Trafficking movies please take the time to educate yourself and do so. These movies are not documentries but they do show you what happens in real life and there is no fluff added. I've listed some of the other movies:
Human Trafficking
Bordertown
Trade
The Secret
Girl 27
Hard Candy, Candy's getting back at a child molester she meets online.
There are a few more but they don't really touch on sex trafficking like Black Snake Moan.

A great deal of the allure in "Taken" comes from the wild juxtaposition of its premise: the idea of Liam Neeson - esteemed, acclaimed, 56-year-old Liam Neeson - kicking all kinds of butt in a Euro B-revenge thriller.

Yes, Pierre Morel's film moves with breathlessly incessant fluidity and speed; that's a given from the director of the French action flick "District B13," working from a script co-written by Luc Besson, for whom this sort of trashy adventure is his baguette and butter. But cast someone you've never heard of in the lead role - someone who didn't receive an Oscar nomination for playing Oskar Schindler, for example - and it might not have worked nearly so well.

Neeson seems to be having a blast, too, unleashing chaos as former CIA operative Bryan Mills. Bryan's been trying to live a quiet life in Los Angeles, where he's moved to be closer to his 17-year-old daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), whom he neglected for years while he was out tracking baddies around the globe. (Grace, the former "Lost" star, seems lost herself at 25 playing a teenager; she does it with the weirdly innocent goofiness of a girl half that age.)

Kim and her mom, Bryan's ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), talk Bryan into allowing her to travel to Paris with a girlfriend. He's reluctant - he knows what dangers lurk in those seemingly glamorous streets! - but he eventually gives in, only to discover that she and her pal are actually planning to travel all over Europe following the U2 tour. (Somehow, that doesn't seem like the kind of band a couple of high school girls would go ga-ga about chasing, but whatever.)

But when Kim and her girlfriend get kidnapped, Bryan must dash over there to prevent a group of Albanian goons from selling her into sex slavery. It's all sordid and unseemly but if you can get past that, "Taken" is also unexpectedly fun in a guilty-pleasure sort of way. Bryan is inordinately violent for a guy his age - he can take down anyone, anywhere, regardless of their weaponry - but he's also got a MacGyver-like resourcefulness.

For example, because he happened to be on the phone with Kim when she was abducted, he's able to piece together not only where she was but the ethnicity of the people who took her. His use of a walkie-talkie and a cell phone in an elaborate rooftop bait-and-switch is also amusing. But mainly he has sheer he has sheer brute force on his side - along with some cheesy, menacing dialogue.