Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) has no time for dick measuring, and neither does Taken – the first guiltlessly watchable film of 2009. Packing into 93 minutes what some cannot achieve in an action trilogy, director Pierre Morel sets a tempo at beat one that gains momentum all the way through his coda. Bryan takes no prisoners, and neither does his story.

An ex-operative of some unnamed sort, Bryan is trying his best to enjoy a retirement that was meant to bring him closer to his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). He reluctantly agrees when she seeks his permission to bounce around Europe for the summer, only to have his worst nightmares realized when she is kidnapped shortly after landing in Paris. His two formerly-parallel lives become one as he pursues his daughter’s kidnappers in a breakneck effort to save her before she’s lost forever.

The current relationship between Bryan and Kim is established with assured ease through a first act that effectively spreads Bryan’s paranoia throughout the audience. The kidnapping may happen in broad daylight, but the dread could not be more thickly spread. The most tightly wrought scene of the film, the kidnapping sets the pace for everything that follows. The viewer experiences it from Bryan’s vantage: nothing but his daughters screams belting from the phone and echoing through his home. It’s scary to behold, and Neeson’s facial meltdown makes it real. The kidnappers are warned – the hunt is on.

The premise has been done before, but Taken wisely avoids the pitfalls that typically plague man-on-a-mission actioners. Bryan has no love affair while in the midst of his hunt. There are no explosions or wildly unbelievable stunts. When he jumps from a bridge and onto a moving boat, he limps away from his initial scuffle with a guard – there are no gimmees.

Appearing in almost every frame, Neeson embodies his very human hero with a poise that begins as awkward, but builds alongside the intensity of Bryan’s mission. A James Bond without the gadgets or the one-liners, Bryan is more human than style. To that end, Neeson’s is a low-key performance that fuels the film while never stealing the focus.

If it does nothing particularly ground-breaking, Taken excels at doing almost nothing wrong. Fight and chase sequences are filmed and edited with a steady hand, making the action fluid and coherent. Bryan’s morals and tactics come into question only once, but that moment of pause is the exception to the rule of compelling realism. Characters exist and conversations take place for a specific reason, and each drives the plot forward with just enough nuance to stay above the lowest-common-denominator.

For all the benefits that such a tense pace offers, however, many moments that are ripe with poignancy are treated as mostly insignificant. Keeping his focus tight, Morel chooses not to linger on these moments, but communication of the breadth of the underlying horror here (the very real danger of being kidnapped in such a way) is forsaken in the name of keeping things moving.

Never meant as a message film, anyway, Taken’s fast clip keeps the tension tight, and builds that impending sense of doom without the use of gimmicky devices like a countdown clock. The events unfold in much the way that most audience members might anticipate, but a dramatic and emotional climax is still effectively met. No sequel necessary, Taken stands on its own – a gem of a flick in a relatively sleepy cinematic month.

By Greg Joachim

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Directed by:
Pierre Morel

Starring:
Liam Neeson
Maggie Grace
Famke Janssen

Released by:
20th Century Fox

Released on:
January 30, 2009