Taken

Look this is not a great film, and from an objective standpoint its difficult to say its even a good film, but it does represent a certain type of film that I have a soft spot for, and as a result I found Taken to be fairly entertaining. Its one of those films where the plot and character development are really incidental to enjoyment of the film, but rather they just revel in their excess and complete ridiculousness of their lead character who increasingly blows his way through increasingly implausible situations in order to achieve some kind of goal which is really minor in the grand scheme of things, but very personal to him (see Shoot Em Up for a prime recent example of this type of thing). In this vein taken does the following things correctly:

-Reintroduces the one punch knockout. There aren't really any extended one on one fight scenes here. Liam Neeson usually just runs into a group of multiple attackers and proceeds to quickly eliminate each of them quickly with either a karate chop to the neck, or a single shot. I like this, if your premise is that the protagonist is some unstoppable force why even bother making it look like he can be defeated?
-No negotiation - just shooitng in the head. And if shooting in an innocent person (in the arm) means he'll be able to get closer to completing his mission - he's willing to do that.
-The Britney Spears clone singer that Neeson has to protect at the beginning of the film (from a knife wielding fan), her name? Sheera. If you don't think I immediately started screaming in my head, then you obviously don't know me.
-Somebody gets decapitated by a bulldozer
-The speech he gives to his daughter as she's being kidnapped by Albanian Sex Traffickers (damn albanians) - solid (and to be honest probably the only worhtwhile piece of dialougue in the film)


There unfortunately were some drawbacks:
-First of all this should have been a hard R film. Going the PG-13 route is a mistake with these type of films. The only way to do these exploitation films correctly is to completely go for it, blood, guts, super high body count (actually they have the last one taken care of here), etc.
-On a related note there is one point of the film where they should completely embrace the insanity and don't. Neeson is sitting at a Marina gunning the engine of a car as a boat he wants to get on gets away, and instead of doing the logical thing and jumping the car onto the boat he chases it on side streets and then jumps onto it from the top of a bridge. Its passing up these kind of opportunities that keeps Taken from being truly transcendent.

Still you throw in a completely unsympathetic daughter, corrupt cop, and ridiculous plot turns, and taken is still a pretty entertaining ride (unsuprising since it was Co-Written by Luc Besson who usually is nothing if no tinteresting). Or maybe its just that I was so stained by Underworld that anything I saw next was going to seem great.

Oh, and I'm sort of excited to see this.

Bonus Point for the ending: Who's Driving the Boat?