An American In Paris- Liam Neeson’s “Taken”

DVD Review

Taken, starring Liam Neeson, 20^th Century Fox, 2008

Bryan (played by Liam Neeson), retired, has very special skills honed while a top-notch field agent for the American CIA. Bryan is also a divorced, very divorced from his ex-wife’s perspective, parent of a precocious teenage daughter with singing aspirations and a yen to head to Europe, Paris first stop, in order to follow the international rock group U-2 (?-for a 2008 teenager but we will let that pass). Those Bryan honed spy skills turned out to come in very handy, once he relented and let that wayward daughter head to Europe. See almost as soon as she (and her dippy friend, her older girlfriend) , as single good-looking teenagers on the loose, are spotted and violently kidnapped by a nefarious international gang of white-slavers who are looking to place young girls in their whorehouses or sell them off to the highest bidder.

Thus, we have the perfect storm between a man with a ruthless set of spy skills and a previously neglected daughter in distress and Bryan must use every one of them before he is through. The bulk of the film revolves around Bryan chasing, hitting, shooting, beating, torturing, shooting (oh, I said that), interrogating, driving, leaping, mano y mano fighting, and just plain being a mal hombre as he works his way through the litany of bad guy involved in the white-slave trade from lowly thuggish Albanians (who seemingly collectively cannot fight off one guy) to middle- man pimp daddy French society figures to paid off French security agents to oil-soaked depraved sheiks who specialize in deflowering young girls before he saves his still chaste daughter (naturally) and sends her back to California and a grateful mother, and more respectful ex-wife.

Recently in reviewing another protective parent drama, 2001s The Deep End, I noted that I had been listening to a “high brow” talking- head discussion about the sea-change that has been occurring in the way American parenting has evolved over the past thirty years or so (the speakers however covered themselves with the caveat that this trend excluded certain ethnic, racial, cultural and class exceptions, in short, this was about how middle, now middle, and upper class parents raise their progeny the cohort of that and this film). The gist of the argument was that the new “coddle”generation (say those under thirty, okay) have never learned to fail, their parents have never allowed them to experience failure, and therefore they have never learned how to fly out of the nest unaided and therefore are ill-equipped to face the wicked old world and its snares. And that is a future problem, no question. However I would amend that statement here and say that old Bryan, with remarkably few scars, won the parent of the year award here, protective or not.