Review by Matt Finley
TAKEN the first was a passably
enjoyable action flick because it trafficked in a sort of
skull-crunching fat-free momentum, wearing all of its sentimentally
out on its sleeve and never getting bogged down with things like
complex characterization or marginal believability. We connect to
Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) simply because his teenaged daughter, Kim
(Maggie Grace), has been kidnapped by sex traffickers. And, as the
movie unspools, we watch him posed as a DEATH WISHian
Bronsonesque hero with Jack Bauer spy skillz, consumed with vigilante
tunnel vision.
It’s fun, in an appropriately
American (read: jaded and self-obsessed) kinda way – he couldn’t
be bothered to bring down the trafficking ring, cut all the girls
loose, blow-up the base and jetpack into the sunset… instead, he
shoulder-checks his way through brothel-loads of k-holed innocents
without a second thought until he reaches his own progeny and strolls
whistling home, leaving the rest of the suffering to languish ‘til
such a time as their own fathers deigned to heave themselves off the
couch and muster their own berserker rampages.
