Movie Review: Taken

3 1/2 of 5 stars

Taken's trailer is a bit misleading. It looks scary and I know when I first saw it I thought - "what? Your father WANTS them to take his daughter"? But it is cleared up within seconds that he is merely trying to help his daughter in the end, by letting them take her.

Taken is a suspense/thriller/pseudo action movie. I say pseudo action in that there are some really cheesy chase scenes (including one where Liam is chasing a car on foot and gets to the destination practically at the same time because he could cut through the park and the car had to circle around a street...yeah Liam might be fast but...the car was speeding.)

The storyline is that he is a retired overprotective over cautious government operative who has seen everything and has an amazing vat of knowledge of how the bad guys work. He agrees to let his daughter go to france with a friend and within hours of their arrival in town they are kidnapped by Algerians who are running a prostitution ring and are particularly targeting young girls vacationing on their own.

Aside from being distracted at first by the idea of Algeria and the fact that I've been playing this stupid Geography game on facebook so I know that the tattoo that the algerians had on their arm was the same symbol as the flag of algeria, the story was fast paced and kept my interest. There were times when I just had to groan in that seriously - ONE GUY can not take down a whole operation or say crash a car horribly down a hill and while the other car is horribly damaged, his car is amazingly drivable.

There is one "ouch that had to hurt moment" where a bulldozer went through a winshield.

There is a betrayal of a friend.
There is an estranged ex wife and rich new husband.


So yes, there is a sense that maybe this story has been done, but then again...it had some originality that made me say that yea I liked it.

The whole prostitution thing was a little offputting but I'm not naive enough to think that sadly this isn't happening in more than a few places in the world.

Will I run out and buy it on DVD - nah. But if you have a chance and want something eventually to rent...it might be interesting for a few hours.