Taken

Felt like a movie this gloomy afternoon, so Scott and I headed to Taken at the Alameda Theatre. Currently the number 4 movie in America, the film is a gloriously preposterous ticking-clock Frantic revamp that swaps daughter for wife, Liam Neeson for Harrison Ford, Pierre Morel for Roman Polanski and Paris for...okay, Paris. It's about a one-time "government worker" (read: super-spy) whose formerly-estranged 17-year-old daughter gets abducted by Albanian sex-slavers while she's on a trip to Europe to - get this - follow U2 around on their summer tour. Of all the hilarious absurdity in this film, this last detail might be my favorite, were it not for the fact that U2 has a new album about to drop, making this sublimely ridiculous notion seem like mere product placement. (I mean, she may as well be going on tour with Bing Crosby, for all the relevance U2 has for the high school demographic.)

This set-up is simply an excuse, of course, for Neeson's snarling sadist to go all Jason Bourne on a bunch of thugs, or all Abu Ghraib on a sleazy kidnapper, depending on whether you read the film as a delightfully post-narrative exercise in mindlessly kinetic cinematic bone-crunching or a delightfully post-9/11 ironically enthusiastic argument for the Bush era's tough-love foreign policy. I chose to read it both ways, my delight intact. We laughed our way through the whole thing, both at the consistently risible plot devices and the genuinely pulse-quickening action.

Thankfully, the filmmakers do not take any of this seriously, which is the only reason why the film works (apart from Neeson's strong work) - an observation that I suspect will become a refrain for me if I continue to write about film. When a wholly preposterous film takes itself seriously I find it far more irritating than a trifle of a film that just wants to have fun and blow things up. Taken is a case of savvy filmmakers, with a decent sense of fun, having a lark and taking the audience along with them. It's a propulsive revenge flick with a pleasingly savage and unsympathetic hero and zero sentiment. It adds up to a fine time at the picture show - which is not to say that the film couldn't be a great deal better.

It would have been better if the daughter had been lying about following U2 around when in reality she just wanted to gallivant around Europe for the summer flirting with, and maybe fucking, a bunch of silly Euroboys.

It would have been better if Liam Neeson had spoken French when posing as a Parisian cop who, as far as I know, speak French. Filmgoers can take a minute or two of subtitles, for chrissake - it's not about authenticity, it's about making him appear like even more of a badass. He can kick the asses of twelve guys at once and speak French!

It also would have been better if the first act - in which we learn that Neeson has been estranged from his daughter, but is trying to connect again - had been, you know, cut. We don't care, and daughter Maggie Grace (of "Lost," my current TV obsession) sucks too much for us to care that we don't care. She is just a hottie MacGuffin, and the sooner those fuckers abduct her, the sooner Liam can kick much ass. Get on with it.

Finally, just a point of interest. I don't know whether it's our "post-9/11 world" or what, but, man, are Americans really this afraid to let their kids do anything? I get that daddy Liam is overprotective because he's a paranoid former spook who has seen all kinds of whatever, but the girl is 17 (although it's true that 25-year-old Grace's version of 17 makes her seem 13) and it doesn't seem entirely far-fetched that she could go to Europe and not get sold into sex-slavery. That is, the filmmakers do an especially weak job of convincing us that this all-important aspect is even possible - I know I just said that I wanted less exposition, and I'll stand by that, but I'm just surprised that the filmmakers thought they needed none about this part of the story.

Two notes: this is a PG13 film that really feels like an R. It's very violent, though there's almost no blood which is how they get away with it. I was convinced it was an R and that the chatty young boys in our aisle had snuck in (for which I applauded them, though we know how I feel about talking in the movies). Also, once again, the projection was substandard. I had to leave the film to ask the staff to correct the framing - the frame line was visible at the top of the screen as was a sliver of the bottom of the next frame. This is pure carelessness.