After a long interval which was mostly unavoidable I am back!

Presenting without any unecessary ramblings, the review of the new
movie titled Taken. As always, the star below the post are for the movie and not the content of the post!



Title: Taken

Director: Pierre Morel


Cast:
Liam Neeson ... Bryan
Maggie Grace ... Kim

Leland Orser ... Sam

Jon Gries ... Casey

David Warshofsky ... Bernie

Holly Valance ... Diva

Katie Cassidy ... Amanda


Plot: Bryan(Neeson) is a retired undercover agent/spy (they never make clear who he really was) who has given up the shadowy dark world of covert operations to spend time with his daughter who is turning 17. His wife left him for a billionaire and took the daughter with her. Neeson is left with nothing really other than a bunch of old work colleagues, beer and you know general misery.
His daughter Kim (Grace) goes out to Paris with one of her friends from where they plan to go around Europe following a rock band tour. Both these girls are underaged and alone in the friend's cousin's upmarket residence in Paris. They befriend a guy at the Airport who leads to them getting kidnapped by a gang who specialize in kidnapping young girls. This gang kidnaps the girls, put them on drugs and then sells the girls to the highest bidder in the underworld.

Kim manages to get a message to her father who immediately dashes to Paris to find and take his daughter back. He now must penetrate this dark world of drugs, rapes, killings and other evils of the world while managing to keep himself alive and find his daughter. And he must do it within 96 hours else he would never be able to see his daughter ever again.

Fun! My Psychobabble: Here is a scene from the movie. So I am this super cool, ultra deadly, trained to kill in my sleep with my bare hands (or loud snores) kinda ass kicking expert in hand to hand combat who is calling upon his years of experience doing dark, dirty, hush hush stuff for the US of A government (who else!). I am hunting for my daughter who has been kidnapped from Paris and I have a lead on a guy who is usually found at Charles de Gaulle airport (the busiest airport in France and possibly the most secure). Great! So what do I do then? I wait keeping my trained eyes on the dude whom I have spotted at the air port. I lurk in the shadows relying on my experience to keep me invisible from security cameras, police and any backup the dude might have. I then follow the dude out till I can corner him in an isolated place (smiling secretly and rather perversely to myself that even disturbs my twisted sense of self realization) and torture him like Daniel Craig was tortured in the last Bond movie (kick those balls baby! Oh yeah!) until he screams the whereabouts of my daughter.

Good plan!

But hold on it is not I whose executing this hold up is it? It is Mr Neeson under the expert guidance of Morel. So what Mr Neeson’s trained, deadly, invisible character does is he pounces on the bad dude in front of the airport, police, cameras, security, dude’s backup and then starts beating the shit out of him! Right in front of the entire Paris and in broad day light! The result!? The dude's backup jumps into the fight, the dude manages to escape, falls from a flyover and is dispatched to the netherworld by a loving hug from an 18 wheeler.

Hmmm nice plan. Neeson might not have the whereabouts of his daughter but hey this was more fun than just lurking in the shadows! And lets face it, nothing interests the sickos in the audience than to see a nice man on man action.

This probably summarizes my review of the movie. The movie is an absolute bore with almost every second sequence torturing your waking conscience making you ask yourself things like “what the heck is this guy doing? My grand mother can do this better than him. Oh weight my grand mother would have never lost my mother like this to begin with. Boy this guy truly sucks.”

The combats fail to impress, the chases are boring, and the plot is overdrawn and poorly conceived.
A lot of dialogues in the movie are spoken in French. Sometimes when you are lucky you do get to see sub titles while the other time you are expected to make educated guesses as to what the characters are trying to say to each other. I am quiet sure in one such situation Neeson says to his friend in the French police something on the lines of "Ahh I am so constipated! All this bloody French food has gotten into my gut and made a bloody concrete bunker in there. Damn you! Damn all your food!"

I personally think that the script was actually written as a lullaby for mentally retarded but when they shunned it the director tried to feed it to us gullible people out on the streets who would sit tight during the course of the movie for nothing else but to recover some cost from that hard earned money we spent on the ticket.

Verdict: If you really want to kill time then please rather go and see paint dry than watch this movie. Give me Bourne series any day!