This movie begins with a very realistic view of some of the troubles in today’s world, as it builds up the backstory before getting stuck into the meat & potatoes of the plot. Liam Neeson‘s acting is pretty good here, but the woman playing his daughter has a serious lack of acting ability – her emotional scenes are cringeworthy in how they’re so skin-deep and bone dry, although to her credit she does get into the role properly once or twice, for the most important scenes, such as the moment of her kidnap. She’s also built so butch she couldn’t possibly be Neeson’s daughter – they don’t look alike and they don’t think alike, and this only magnifies the issue of poor acting, but fortunately she won’t be doing much in this movie beyond her role in the beggining and even less in the end, so this isn’t a major issue once it gets going.
The kidnap scene happens shortly before the end of the first hour, and aside from this being a rare moment of good acting from the daughter of Neeson’s character, it’s also the first time Neeson shows his talent as a “preventer” which lays the groundwork nicely for whats to come and makes the movie quite exciting going forwards, with about one hour remaining. This particular kidnap scene is well directed, well scripted, well planned and well supported with good cinematography and good acting – it only lasts a few minutes but it’s easily the most memorable and powerful moment of the movie, and as such, quite appropriately it makes clever use of the word Taken which is where this movie gets its name from – in fact a trilogy of movies (Taken in 2008; Taken 2 in 2012; Taken 3 in 2014).
Aside from strong combative tactics & techniques empty hands, blades, guns and makeshift weaponary too (massive credit to the fight choreographers there), some of the other niche problems & solutions demonstrated by Neeson in this movie are pretty realistic too, on topics such as rush-job crimescene analysis, suspect tracking, ad-hoc interrogation, room-clearing counter-measures and stunt driving, which all adds to the credible impression of his character and makes for a better movie in general. He’s basically an ex paramilitary operator with very tidy hands-on skills plus connections that enable him to get any kind of info he needs from government. He doesn’t move like an athlete, he’s even a bit physically feeble in his movement, which is a big red flag to the trained eye, considering his alleged top-level hands-on military background; but considering his age, his variety of skills, and his extremely useful connections, his obvious physical flaws do actually match a different kind of agent that makes his character credible again, ie someone privileged in an agency like the CIA where he’d have access to all the best training and connections without really needing to train so hard physically as someone coming through the military system would. Now if we go with this concept just to make the acting credible, the main thing that doesn’t add up now is how he’s so broke – he ought to be well set. Retiring completely from any kind of well-earning work just to be closer to his daughter who he’s still very distant with, doesn’t really add up, especially if we go with the privileged agent narrative. If he were ever operating on that level, he would have earnt plenty before he retired; else with all those connections on top of the kind of drive displayed in this movie, he should be easily capable finding work that closely suits his lifestyle preferences and still pays quite well – especially something senior in the security industry. Enough to buy a last-minute plane ticket at least. With all that specialist training and such a conservative approach to parenting, one would expect him to have saved up and cached away some resources for a rainy day, if only to help in case of emergency – exactly this very kind of emergency for example, which he was already predicting and trying to prevent before it happened. So some things just don’t add up here, but it’s not so bad that it significantly detracts from the power of the movie – it’s mainly just something that comes to mind when stopping to think critically about the credibility of the lead character’s story. On the surface, things generally seem quite realistic (except for the daughter’s awful acting early on).
At the half-way mark, when he gets close to the trail of his daughter and finds someone who she befriended and gave her jacket to, this movie looks potentially set for a rating of Above Average if it continues on its current trajectory which has had plenty of slow & dry patches but some impressive occasional highs too and seems to be still building momentum and just starting to get into the thick of the plot. Unfortunately the highs are a bit less impressive in the second half – the creativity doesn’t dry up entirely, and the action scenes are stll respectably made, but the momentum dwindles slightly and this becomes a Bang Average movie in the end.