Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

Dangerous dad

Memo to the International Federation of Greasy Thugs: If you’re going to kidnap young female travelers to support a sex-slave business, you should try to avoid girls whose fathers are former U.S. intelligence agents with “unique skill sets.”

A bunch of Albanian goons learn that lesson the hard way in “Taken,” sort of a mutant hybrid of “The Bourne Identity” and “Father Knows Best.”

With his tall, broad-shouldered build, craggy visage and growly voice, Liam Neeson is well cast as the protagonist, Bryan Mills, who has retired from a government career in which he “prevented bad things from happening.”

That career cost him his marriage to ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), now hitched to a rich industrial tycoon, as well as his relationship with daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), now 17.

Bryan has just moved to Los Angeles to rebuild a connection with Kim, so he’s perturbed to learn that she wants to travel to Paris, accompanied only by a 19-year-old girlfriend. Bryan, who knows all too well how bad the world can be, grudgingly agrees.

The girls have barely landed in France before they’re being hit on by a glib young Frenchman who turns out to be the front for the aforementioned sex-slave ring, run by Albanian hoods so vicious that even the Russian mafia gives them a wide berth.

The girls haven’t even unpacked before they’re being snatched, and across the ocean, Bryan hears the whole thing on Kim’s cell phone. When one of the kidnappers picks up the phone, Bryan delivers a speech that sets up the rest of the movie:

“I have a very particular set of skills acquired over a very long career that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you ... and I will kill you.”

And off we go, with Bryan employing that skill set in wondrously efficient style, combining MacGyver-like inventiveness with Terminator-like relentlessness to mow through the thugs like a scythe through wheat on his way up their rancid little food chain.

Like his ideological comrade, Jack Bauer, Bryan not only does what he must do, he’s not averse to going the extra mile, as in a searing scene toward the end when he confronts a former colleague in French internal security (Olivier Rabourdin) and learns that his old pal knows more about the sex-slave ring than he has previously admitted.

The dialogue has some odd cadences, and some of the lines sparked unintentional laughs at my screening. But then, the filmmakers are not working in their native language.

They’re French — Pierre Morel, a career cameraman and cinematographer working only his second film as a director, and Luc Besson, who wrote the scripts for the “Transporter” films and the movie and TV versions of “La Femme Nikita.”

But hey, do you really look to films like this for great dialogue? It’s all about the action, and on that front, this tidy thriller — which goes about its business in a brisk 100 minutes — delivers.

In the high heat of summer, “Taken” would be trampled into the dust by the annual stampede of big-budget blockbusters. But in the dead of winter, when the studios tend to release their cut-rate, bargain-bin fare, this is a welcome shot of adrenaline for hungry action-movie fans.