Getting ‘Taken’

The hero of Taken is a retired CIA agent named Bryan Mills, a man whose years of experience shows on his weathered face and nearly every gesture he makes. When he wraps his daughter’s birthday present he does it with such immaculate precision you’d think he was trying to create a piece of modern art. It’s this kind of scrupulousness, this stunning hawk-eyed attention to detail, that keeps him alive, and it is what will eventually help him save his teenage daughter, Kim, when she is kidnapped by the Albanian mafia.

Unlike the protagonist, the director of this revenge thriller, Pierre Morel, doesn’t seem to be interested in details. He allows the script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen to take on the proportions of a mythic, urban tale. Mills is a flawless man. Not even John McClane, the invincible hero of Die Hard, would be able to outsmart him. Mills, in fact, commits no mistakes — his revenge is as precise as the wrapping on his daughter’s birthday present. There’s no question that he’ll rescue his little girl. The thrill is in seeing how he does it.

Watching the film, I recalled the sequence in Braveheart in which the Scots recount the story of William Wallace’s ascendancy with outrageous hyperbole — “He’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse!” (Mel Gibson’s historical drama, at its core, was about revenge.) Bryan Mills has that same larger-than-life quality. The director wants us to take pleasure in every moment of violent retribution — every bolt of lightening from Mills’ arse. We even relish the moment when Mills informs his invidious ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), that their daughter has been kidnapped (the bitchy sybarite had been fiercely adamant that nothing would ever happen to her baby).

It’s as close as you can get to sadism as pop entertainment. Of course, there’s the horror genre, but horror movies thrive on fear, not vicarious sadism. Not even the other revenge flick that was released earlier this year, The Last House on the Left, could give its audience this much morbid satisfaction in watching people die. In Taken, revenge isn’t sweet — it’s freaking cool. And that, one might argue, is precisely the problem. By the end, I felt as if I just finished playing a video game — or perhaps, more accurately, the game had been playing me.

Grade: B-