Taken

Taken is a new movie that was released late January, I just saw it this last weekend. The movie stars Liam Neeson and Maggie Grace. I didn't know really how cool Liam Neeson was until I'd seen this movie, I think he has the best voice in all of Hollywood. He sounds extremely badass, and looks like he can cause a lot of carnage if he wants to, verbally and physically. I found the story to be particularly interesting, I don't think this topic has been done before actually.

Bryan Mills (Neeson) is a retired government worker, or "preventer" as he likes to call himself. His wife left him due to his being away all the time, takes their daughter Kim, and marries an extremely rich business tycoon. Due to his sporadic, irregular lifestyle, Bryan rarely gets any time at all to spend with his daughter, and the gap between them increases greatly. He finally retires and moves to LA where he wants to try and reconnect with Kim. On her seventeenth birthday party, he bought for her a little karaoke machine, because last he'd heard she wanted to become a singer when she grew up, but her mom and step dad bought her a pony, a heartbroken Mills goes home and drinks it away with his old coworkers. A few days later, his daughter asks him to go out to lunch together, an eager Bryan hurries there, only to realize that this was a clever ruse on her part in order to coax him into signing a release form so she can "go to Paris," when in reality she was going on a European tour, following some random rock band. Being the paranoid man he is, he very reluctantly signs the form, still unaware of what she really plans to do.

After landing in Paris, Kim and her friend Amanda are greeted by a friendly, Parisian boy who invites them to a party that will be going on later tonight. Little do they know that they just gave their apartment address to a team of women traffickers. This is where the movie starts to get really interesting. Later that day, a crowd of Albanian men barge into their apartment and abduct both of the girls. Kim managed to explain to her dad quickly on the phone he gave her exactly what was going on, he later used the voices he heard on the phone call to track down who these men where. He finds out that Kim and Amanda are destined to become drug- addicted sex slaves for the rest of their lives. The time he has to save them until their fate is sealed? 96 hours.

Mills then takes his ex- wife's husband's private jet to Paris, where he starts kicking some Albanian ass. Possibly the coolest scene in the movie is when he's chasing down the French boy who first approached the girls, and after a couple minutes of pursuit, the kid jumps over a bridge, lives, stands up, and gets splattered everywhere by an oncoming bus. After many disguises, guns, and negotiating with the Albanian pimps, he's led to where his daughter is being auctioned off to some high class Arabians. He extorts one of the people to buy the girl so he knows where she's going, and jumps in a beastly Audi A8 and chases down the boat where she is being loaded, kills the huge, semi naked Arabian sheik who about to undress his daughter, and brings her back to the United States.

This movie is pretty cool. Don't expect something of Fight Club caliber or anything, but its a good action movie that gets the blood flowing. And its a really quick movie, there is always something happening, to keep even the most mundane, easily amused, quickly bored monkeys glued to the screen until the end.