The film follows a former C.I.A. operative named Bryan (Neeson), whose wife (Famke Janssen) left him years ago, taking their teenage daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace from "Lost") with her and getting hitched to a rich man (Xander Bereley). Despite his apparent loneliness, the light of Bryan's life is his warm relationship with his daughter.
When Kim wants to spend a week in Paris with her friends, Bryan is reluctant as any father would be, but he ultimately allows her to go. Immediately after she and her friend land in Paris, the girls meet a young man named Peter (Nicolas Giraud), who works a little flirty con and finds out where they're staying - as well as the fact that they'll be alone. Predictably, foreign thugs break into the girls apartment within a few hours and take them hostage. Fortunately, Bryan was on the phone with his daughter when the abduction occured, and being highly familiar learned enough about the kidnappers identity from his daughter's words (as well as those of the kidnappers) to know where to start looking.
That's about the first half hour. In acs two and three, the supporting cast become mere markers as the rest of the film centers entirely on Bryan's tireless rampage around Paris, smashing his way through the French underworld to find his missing daughter. With a window of less than 100 hours to find her before she's sold into sexual slavery and disappears forever, Bryan pulls absolutely no punches (and I mean none - he shoots the police chief's wife just to prove how serious he is) in tracking her down. He shows absolute zero mercy to anyone, and it's hard to blame him - who wouldn't set the world on fire to save their child?
Neeson rises above relatively wooden dialogue with an understated, magnetic prescence. His quiet grace fits perfectly into the role of a trained killer. After all, this is freakin Darkman we're talking about. The guy trained Batman and Obi-Wan, for God's sake.
The film obviously didn't have the budget of a Bourne flick, but all parties involved - especially Neeson - made the very best out of the tools they had to work with. The violence is graphic (remember the clip in the trailer where Neeson stabs the guy's legs with metal posts? Yeah, they left out the part where he connected them to a metal current.) but not gory, and despite camerawork that was a little tight and cuts that were a little too quick, the fights were done well.
With Taken, Pierre Morel proves himself as more than a one-hit wonder. He's two for two now, which puts him firmly on our radar. Next up on Morel's agenda is From Paris With Love, an upcoming crime drama starring John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Look for it later this year.
