Monday, February 16, 2009

Movie review: Taken

The trailer for the movie Taken looked interesting, so today we went to a matinee. Rated R.

The trailer shows the daughter getting kidnapped. What they conveniently leave out of the trailer is that she's kidnapped by sex traffickers.

Liam Neeson's character is the girl's father, a retired CIA agent with a "specialized set of skills". The mom is re-married to a zillionaire and she apparently lacks any common sense at all. She allows the daughter (17) to go to Europe with a girlfriend who is also 17. They tell Liam that she'll be staying in Paris with the friend's cousin (19). Liam thinks its a bad idea, but they pressure him into signing the custodial permission form for her to leave the country. It turns out that the daughter won't be staying in Paris but will be following U2 around all of Europe on tour. The mom knows this. What she doesnt know is that the friend's cousin is actually in Spain all summer and the two 17-yr olds are in Paris alone. The girls are selected at the airport by a young man who is a spotter for the traffickers, finding girls who are traveling alone. The girls are kidnapped quickly, but Liam's daughter is on the phone to Liam when it happens, so he can hear that they are Albanian. Liam's CIA friends report that he has about 96 hours to find her before she's gone forever. So he jets to Paris to find her. Lots of Jason Bourne type of action follows as he tracks her down. He finds her just as she is being sold to a Shiek and manages to get onboard the boat to rescue her.

Movie contains drugs, forced prostituion, lots of realistic violence, but I don't recall any full nudity...even in the shipping container brothel the sex slaves are covered in sheets and in the slave auction they are wearing Las Vegas style bikinis.

Not particularly recommended. And I shudder to think how sexually graphic the UK/European NC-17 version of this is.

The story is pretty horrific. Paris cops who are on the take from the Albanians; the man running the slave auction tells Liam it's just a unique business, it's not personal. The filming is good, the stunts were very good and some were extremely creative and fresh. The acting is good.

Sure, the brownies are made with dog poop, but they were baked at 450 degrees for 45 minutes so it must be ok, right?

1 comment:

Marmee of Bear Meadow said...

Hmmm...I think I'll save my money. Certainly won't be searching for the UK version! But I hope people are alerted to the horrible evil of sex trafficking; tragically, it is real and prevalent in many parts of the world. I need to pray harder for the victims and for those who work for their freedom. An excellent book on the subject is "Terrify No More" by Gary A. Haugen. As the jacket says, "Out of shocking depravity emerges a story of hope."