TAKEN

Liam Neeson plays a character crossed between Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne and Horatio off CSI Miami. It is morally and politically suspect – one huge, throbbing right wing boner of a movie, but it turned out to be something of a guilty pleasure.

Neeson has to track down his kidnapped daughter using as much ultraviolence as possible. Essentially the plot (wafer thin as it is) was pretty much lifted wholesale from Commando except without the jokes. It should have been filmed on a much lesser budget and turned up on Channel Five on a Friday night in about a years time. In fact I can’t help but think that Liam Neeson must live on the same street as Steven Seagal and that a rookie postman delivered the script to the wrong house. This resulted in Neeson stomping around Paris being exceptionally po faced, and kicking all kinds of miscellaneous euro ass.  Whilst perhaps in return, Steven Seagal will turn up soon in a tense political thriller?

For a film so utterly preposterous it takes itself WAAAAY too seriously. So all signs point toward this being terrible, and by rights it should be. But as I say, it’s quite the guilty pleasure, and if you don’t enjoy Neeson calmly telling a  terrorist about his ‘certain set of skills’, then you just can’t enjoy anything!

IMDB: TAKEN