“Taken” at Last
So Dr. Fiancee and I finally saw Taken
last night. It was a lot of fun, suspenseful, and exciting. I can see now why the movie was in the Top 5 of box office draws for the last 4 weeks or so. We were entertained from beginning to end; and the film is well-written and produced.
The story is obviously molded around the theme of John Ford’s The Searchers
, with a world-weary outsider coming in from the cold to piece back together a community in which he no longer belongs. But the filmmakers ably make this well-worn story arc relevant to our times. Liam Neeson was very believable as the ex-CIA dad determined to recover his daughter at all costs; and so was Maggie Grace as the teenage daughter (Yes, she plays a 17-year old, but she pulls it off! We think a silly Napoleon Dynamite-style run that she does whenever she’s excited has something to do with it).
As previously noted, the movie has no qualms depicting Muslim villains, a touch self-imposed PC codes make very rare in Hollywood cinema (Taken is a French picture in Hollywood clothes).
Before the movie started we were shown – among others – the trailer for Sundance favorite Sin Nombre (Without a Name, in Spanish), a combination road-movie/crime drama set in Mexico by a young filmmaker out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Looked good!
