taken movie review

• Consequence

Classic Film Review: Ten Years Later, Taken Is Still Defined By Its Most Iconic Scene

Ten years ago, Liam Neeson showed off his particular set of skills for the first time

Directed by

• Pierre Morel
• Liam Neeson
• Maggie Grace
• Famke Janssen

Release Year

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you”.

Imagine an entire film franchise springing from the success of a single scene. Ask the average person what they remember most from 2009’s  Taken , and they’re likely to cite the above speech, growled by ex-CIA Agent and current overprotective dad Bryan Mills ( Liam Neeson ) to the kidnappers of his daughter Kim ( Maggie Grace ) — setting up the seventy minutes of mayhem to follow. Ask them to remember anything else, and they’ll likely come up blank.

And yet that single, evocative moment launched two sequels, a television series, and a host of all-budget imitators. It’s a testament to the strength of that scene, which was indelible enough that the film’s own marketing largely revolved around it. The gamble worked, too; Taken ‘s $25 million budget made its eventual $226 million box office take a particular miracle, opening up a new subgenre of mid-budget Eurotrash action movies and a career revival for Neeson.

But does the rest of the film hold up to that singular, iconic phone call? Prior to it, we get a solid half hour of character-building with Neeson’s Mills, an ex-CIA agent who’s given up his life of extrajudicial torture and counter-terrorism efforts to become a backyard-grilling suburbanite. He spends his days working security for pop stars, and his nights chugging beers with his old CIA buddies. It’s lean but efficient character-building, Neeson establishing Mills as an overprotective dad whose training pulls him to keep a closer-than-usual eye on Kim, with whom he’s attempting to rekindle a relationship. However, when a girls’ trip to Europe goes wrong, and she’s abducted by sex traffickers, the infamous phone call occurs, and he’s on the warpath to get her back.

For the next hour, Mills does exactly that. Much like its spiritual successor  John Wick , the first  Taken simply positions its star to mow through reams of anonymous Eastern European heavies.. It gets more than a bit repetitive after a while, but co-writer/producer Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel (who would only direct the first) still provide a novel showcase for Neeson’s particular set of skills. We’re used to Neeson being a grimacing badass by now, but back in 2009 it was novel to see Oskar Schindler running down guys half his age in a car. Even if it all feels like window dressing to get to his inevitable victory, there’s a sense of glee and excitement in Neeson’s performance that was sorely lacking in the  Taken sequels and many of its ensuing imitators. Just as Neeson’s clearly having fun playing with his previously buttoned-up prestige actor persona and getting down in the muck, one gets the feeling that this scenario activates in Mills a sense of righteous fury that his mundane suburban life can’t provide.

However, taking a step back from the immediate thrill of Bryan Mills tearing through Albanian sex traffickers like so much Irish butter, the politics of  Taken certainly align with many of the ugly post-9/11 impulses America was reckoning with at the time. Taken  is your dad’s favorite movie for a reason: it’s about an angry, paranoid Boomer rescuing his beautiful, virgin-pure daughter from scary Eastern men who want to drug her up and auction her off to sheikhs. As politics go, it’s the film adaptation of an email forward from your uptight uncle who watches too much Fox News: Foreigners are foaming at the mouth to steal my beautiful daughter, but if they do I’ll totally grab my gun and go kick their asses . Bryan Mills is the platonic ideal of the Conservative Dad: a cool dude who knows about Beyoncé  and the best way to create a homemade torture device using a battery, a good guy with a gun who’s prepared to do Whatever It Takes.

However handsomely and efficiently staged, the actual action in this action movie feels immaterial. It’s a foregone conclusion that Mills is going to get his daughter back, no matter what obstacles are thrown in his way. He’s an invincible juggernaut who does exactly what he threatens to do over the phone: become “a nightmare” for the men who took his daughter. Unlike  John Wick (which miraculously cost $5 million  less to make), the action’s not well-staged enough to feel all that novel. Mills doesn’t operate in an attractively intriguing world; he just runs down cobblestone Parisian streets and shouts at underwritten henchmen and corrupt detectives, the washed-out look of Michel Abramowicz’s cinematography clearly designed more for economy than style.

That in turn brings us back to the “particular set of skills” scene, a great, efficient work of suspense storytelling that tells the audience everything they need to know about Mills’ plight and what he plans to do about it. In microcosm, it should be celebrated, but it’s hard to blame anyone who would turn off the film after that single, beautiful moment. While Neeson would fine-tune his new career as Boomer God Warrior in other, better films (see his works with Jaume Collet-Serra for reference),  Taken  remains the Rosetta Stone for an entire subgenre of January Neesons , and for at least that (and not its politics), it should be regarded.

Personalized Stories

Around the web, latest stories.

Stress Positions Puts John Early In the Middle of Pandemic Hell: Review

April 19, 2024

Civil War Dispassionately Reports On The Last Days of America: Review

April 12, 2024

Challengers Review: Zendaya Stuns In Luca Guadagnino's Exhilarating Tennis Drama

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man Is a Gorgeous Action Spectacle: Review

April 4, 2024

The Pretty Good and Hilariously Bad of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

March 28, 2024

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Leans Harder Than Ever Before on Nostalgia: Review

March 20, 2024

Road House Review: A Ripped Jake Gyllenhaal Doesn't Rip Any Throats In Solid B-Movie Remake

March 18, 2024

The American Society of Magical Negroes Speaks Savagely With Its Satire: Review

March 15, 2024

• Album Streams
• Upcoming Releases
• Film Trailers
• TV Trailers
• Pop Culture
• Album Reviews
• Concert Reviews
• Festival Coverage
• Film Reviews
• Cover Stories
• Hometowns of Consequence
• Song of the Week
• Album of the Month
• Behind the Boards
• Dustin ‘Em Off
• Track by Track
• Top 100 Songs Ever
• Crate Digging
• Best Albums of 2023
• Best Songs of 2023
• Best Films of 2023
• Best TV Shows of 2023
• Top Albums of All Time
• Festival News
• Festival Outlook
• How to Get Tickets
• Photo Galleries
• Consequence Daily
• The Story Behind the Song
• Kyle Meredith
• Stanning BTS
• In Defense of Ska
• Long Time No See
• Good for a Weekend
• Consequence UNCUT
• The Spark Parade
• Beyond the Boys Club
• Going There with Dr. Mike
• The What Podcast
• Consequence Uncut
• Behind the Boys Club
• Two for the Road
• 90 Seconds or Less
• Battle of the Badmate
• Video Essays
• News Roundup
• First Time I Heard
• Mining Metal

Theme Weeks

• Industrial Week
• Marvel Week
• Disney Week
• Foo Fighters Week
• TV Theme Song Week
• Sex in Cinema Week

Follow Consequence

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Movie Review | 'Taken'

‘Taken’ Review: Vigilante Daddy Avenges Kidnapping

By Manohla Dargis

• Jan. 29, 2009

“Taken” stars a dour Liam Neeson as a big bad papa bear on the rampaging hunt for his baby cub, a virginal Los Angeles teenager — the first of many dubious plot points — who has been snatched while vacationing in Paris by hairy and scary Albanians who put her on the auction block. The movie was produced by the international hitmaker Luc Besson, who is best known for bankrolling action fare like the “Transporter” series and who shares writing credit on this exploitative throwaway with Robert Mark Kamen.

Mr. Besson, who made his reputation in the 1980s directing entertainments like “Subway,” was a central figure in a French movement called the cinéma du look, work that emphasized slick visuals, avoided ideology and politics, and paid closer heed to spectacle than to narrative. Although Mr. Besson now casts a wider net as a producer — he went somewhat upscale with the recent art house thriller “Tell No One” — the genre movies that carry his brand tend to be predictably homogeneous, with more or less the same look (glossy), sound (blaring) and pace (relentless). That more or less describes “Taken,” as well as innumerable action flicks from Hollywood to Hong Kong, of course, though this digitally dreary-looking movie also gleefully trades on the specter of American vigilante justice.

Directed by Pierre Morel, who kept bodies and scenes jumping in the superior “District B13,” another Besson factory production, “Taken” starts in low gear and almost immediately stalls out. Mr. Neeson’s character, Bryan Mills, a former operative for the Central Intelligence Agency (he calls himself a “preventer”), has hung up his black bag to repair his relationship with his long-neglected daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). It’s a tough road for Bryan, particularly since he has to compete with Kim’s bitter mother (Famke Janssen, in a thankless role) and wealthy stepfather (Xander Berkeley). Happily for Bryan, nothing brings an estranged daughter back into the patriarchal fold faster than the threat of being served up like a bonbon to a salivating, knife-wielding sheik from the Republic of Cinematic Stereotypes.

The story, which opens in Los Angeles, perks up once it moves to the more dangerous environs of Paris, where legions of predators prowl for salable young things. By chance, or rather because of the shamelessly lazy filmmaking, Kim is on the phone with Bryan when the wolves break down her door, which allows him to tell off her kidnappers: “I will find you. And I will kill you.” He makes good on both promises and, in a repellent scene, he also tortures and electrocutes one of the bad guys, employing techniques he mastered while in the C.I.A. Swarthy Europeans and Arabs may still be the villains du jour at the movies, but the Americans, including those with inexplicable Irish accents, are, alas, catching up.

“Taken” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A veritable tasting menu of death, courtesy of knives, fists, electricity and guns of various calibers.

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Pierre Morel; written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen; director of photography, Michel Abramowicz; edited by Frederic Thoraval; music by Nathaniel Mechaly; production designer, Hugues Tissandier; produced by Mr. Besson; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes.

WITH: Liam Neeson (Bryan), Maggie Grace (Kim), Leland Orser (Sam), Jon Gries (Casey), David Warshofsky (Bernie), Katie Cassidy (Amanda), Holly Valance (Sheerah), Xander Berkeley (Stuart) and Famke Janssen (Lenore).

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Get the app
• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Explaining the News to Our Kids

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

Common sense media reviewers.

Violent, disturbing rescue/revenge thriller isn't for kids.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

A father becomes a vigilante to save his endangere

Brian's only redeeming quality is his absolute lov

Although there's little blood, the violence is rel

Young women are depicted as pawns in a sex traffic

Language includes words like "a--hole," "s--t," "d

Featured brands include Audi, Nissan, Sony, Merced

Adults drink at a cocktail party; some characters

Parents need to know that this "hard PG-13" thriller seems just a drop of blood or two away from an R rating. Not only is there a great deal of violence, but a disturbing subplot centers on young women being kidnapped into the seedy world of sex slavery. The themes of revenge, vigilantism, sex and drug trafficking,…

Positive Messages

A father becomes a vigilante to save his endangered daughter. A young woman and her friend disregard common sense in search of a good time abroad. Vigilantism and revenge seem justified.

Positive Role Models

Brian's only redeeming quality is his absolute love for his daughter. This positive aspect of his character is ultimately diluted by the violent means he takes to save her.

Violence & Scariness

Although there's little blood, the violence is relentless for the majority of the movie, and there's a high body count overall. People are tortured, killed, and attacked with guns, knives, explosives, cars, and other weapons (belts, fire extinguishers, you name it). A character is willing to shoot innocent people if it will extract valuable information.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Young women are depicted as pawns in a sex trafficking ring. Most are forced to be prostitutes, and some are sold to the highest bidders like slaves. Many women are half dressed but not nude. Shirtless men are shown going into rooms where drugged women are on the bed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes words like "a--hole," "s--t," "dick," "goddamn," "hell," and "ass."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Featured brands include Audi, Nissan, Sony, Mercedes Benz, and Kodak.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink at a cocktail party; some characters smoke; young women are high so that they won't resist being sex slaves/prostitutes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this "hard PG-13" thriller seems just a drop of blood or two away from an R rating. Not only is there a great deal of violence, but a disturbing subplot centers on young women being kidnapped into the seedy world of sex slavery. The themes of revenge, vigilantism, sex and drug trafficking, and international political corruption are too intense for young audiences. Language is moderate ("s--t," "a--hole"), but drug use is widespread (though not a lot of actual use is shown on camera), and characters also drink and smoke. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (53)
• Kids say (121)

Based on 53 parent reviews

If you want to put your teenage daughter off travelling - let her watch this

Great film, what's the story.

In TAKEN, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a former CIA operative who's retired early to Los Angeles to be closer to his 17-year-old daughter Kim ( Maggie Grace ). Bryan reluctantly agrees to let Kim travel to Europe with her impetuous friend Amanda ( Katie Cassidy ), but only if she takes an international cell phone with her and promises to call every day. His concerns seem quite justified: Within half an hour of landing in Paris, Kim and Amanda are kidnapped into a disturbing world of sex trafficking. Luckily for Kim, she was checking in with her dad when the kidnapping took place, so Bryan is immediately able to use his counterintelligence skills to track down the European thugs responsible for her capture.

Is It Any Good?

Neeson is an actor of considerable gravitas, and it's downright puzzling why this is his first meaty role in a mainstream film since Batman Begins . While he's well cast as an unstoppable father who could -- and would -- do serious damage to anyone in order to save his daughter, he's just too good for this revenge flick. And Grace, who's actually 25, plays Kim as way too immature (she even affects the awkward run of an uncoordinated 8-year-old girl). No wonder she was such an easy mark.

Still, this thriller could be used as a cautionary tale for trusting high school girls traveling abroad. Kim and Amanda disclose so much information to a complete stranger -- even sharing a cab with him -- that it's eye-rollingly infuriating. Perhaps French director Pierre Morel thinks wealthy L.A. teens would act this way, but it's hard to swallow. But even harder to believe is that a CIA-trained specialist would kill seemingly everyone (and that's no exaggeration) he meets without saving anyone other than his daughter. Morel shows dozens of women enslaved for their bodies, but in the end audiences are supposed to just forget about them and cheer for Kim? That's quite disturbing.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what makes this PG-13-rated movie different from R-rated films.

Is the violence less graphic or upsetting? Why or why not? What impact does seeing this kind of violence have on teens ?

Families can also discuss the ethical and moral lines that characters cross in the movie. Are Bryan's actions justified because he finds his daughter?

Kim and her friend partially to blame for their perilous dilemma? What mistakes did they make?

How are Americans portrayed in the film (versus Europeans)?

Movie Details

• In theaters : January 30, 2009
• On DVD or streaming : May 12, 2009
• Cast : Famke Janssen , Liam Neeson , Maggie Grace
• Director : Pierre Morel
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Twentieth Century Fox
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 94 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : intense sequences of violence, disturbing thematic material, sexual content, some drug references and language
• Last updated : January 1, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

Live Free or Die Hard

Thriller Movies

Thriller books for teens.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Turn autoplay off

Turn autoplay on

Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off

• Jump to content [s]
• Jump to site navigation [0]
• Jump to search [4]
• Terms and conditions [8]
• Your activity
• Email subscriptions
• Account details
• Linked services
• Press office
• Guardian Print Centre
• Guardian readers' editor
• Observer readers' editor
• Terms of service
• Privacy policy
• Advertising guide
• Digital archive
• Digital edition
• Guardian Weekly
• Buy Guardian and Observer photos

Today's paper

• Main section
• G2 features
• Comment and debate
• Editorials, letters and corrections
• Other lives
• SocietyGuardian
• Life & style
• Environment

This week's films

Reviews in chronological order (Total 4 reviews)

15 February 2009 12:00PM

• Recommend? ( 0 )
• Report abuse

Link to this comment:

22 July 2009 4:38PM

2 November 2010 12:01PM

OldTiresias

What was the body count.

This was a film I wish I hadn't spent the time watching - a truly awful action-packed drama . What was the point apart from the obvious commercial aspect. Naughty 'low other' south-eastern yurpeans fuelling the sexual fantasies of wealthy 'low other' middle-easterners. Stereotypes abound. But please tell me who was piloting the boat? And why didn't our hero fly home on a private plane? Grade A rubbish.

10 July 2011 1:41PM

Today's best video

The week in tv, 'get your arse out, mate', spanish football player's stunning solo goal, whitewater kayaking: 'i wanted to spend every day on the river'.

• Most viewed

Last 24 hours

• 2. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review
• 3. Quiz: Can you match each of these Bond villains with their own evil plot?
• 4. After Gremlins and The Goonies, what other 80s films need a remake?
• 5. Brendan Gleeson: sins of the fathers
• More most viewed
• 2. Mickey Rooney cuts family out of will
• 3. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review
• 4. Brendan Gleeson: sins of the fathers
• 5. Cate Blanchett sets her sights on Sutton Hoo drama The Dig
• All today's stories

Film search

Latest reviews.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review

Marc Webb's superhero sequel is savvy, punchy and dashing enough to stir the blood of even the most jaded adult, writes Xan Brooks

Noah review – 'a preposterous but endearingly unhinged epic'

The Double review – Richard Ayoade's dark doppelganger drama

Divergent review – lacks lustre and grit

A Story of Children and Film review – Mark Cousins's 'spine-tingling' visual essay

Sponsored feature

• Across the site
• Film reviews
• Film trailers
• Video interviews
• License/buy our content
• Terms & conditions
• Accessibility
• Inside the Guardian blog
• Work for us
• Join our dating site today
• © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

• Twentieth Century Fox

Summary When his estranged daughter is kidnapped in Paris, a former spy sets out to find her at any cost. Relying on his special skills, he tracks down the ruthless gang that abducted her and launches a one-man war to bring them to justice and rescue his daughter. [20th Century Fox]

Directed By : Pierre Morel

Written By : Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen

Where to Watch

Liam Neeson

Bryan mills.

Maggie Grace

Famke Janssen

Leland Orser

David Warshofsky

Holly Valance

Katie Cassidy

Xander Berkeley

Olivier Rabourdin

Jean-claude.

Gérard Watkins

Arben Bajraktaraj

Radivoje bukvic, mathieu busson, undercover agent, michel flash.

Nicolas Giraud

Rubens hyka, camille japy, valentin kalaj, critic reviews.

• All Reviews
• Positive Reviews
• Mixed Reviews
• Negative Reviews

User Reviews

Related movies.

Seven Samurai

The Wild Bunch

North by Northwest

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

The French Connection

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Incredibles

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

House of Flying Daggers

Assault on Precinct 13

The Hidden Fortress

Gangs of Wasseypur

Captain Blood

Related news.

2024 Movie Release Calendar

Jason dietz.

Find release dates for every movie coming to theaters, VOD, and streaming throughout 2024 and beyond, updated weekly.

Every Zack Snyder Movie, Ranked

With the arrival of Zack Snyder's latest Rebel Moon chapter on Netflix, we rank every one of the director's films—from bad to, well, less bad—by Metascore.

Every Guy Ritchie Movie, Ranked

We rank every one of the British director's movies by Metascore, from his debut Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels to his brand new film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

April Movie Preview (2024)

Keith kimbell.

The month ahead will bring new films from Alex Garland, Luca Guadagnino, Dev Patel, and more. To help you plan your moviegoing options, our editors have selected the most notable films releasing in April 2024, listed in alphabetical order.

DVD/Blu-ray Releases: New & Upcoming

Find a list of new movie and TV releases on DVD and Blu-ray (updated weekly) as well as a calendar of upcoming releases on home video.

Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

• DVD & Streaming
• Action/Adventure , Drama , Mystery/Suspense

Content Caution

In Theaters

• January 30, 2009
• Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills; Maggie Grace as Kim; Famke Janssen as Lenore; Olivier Rabourdin as Jean-Claude; Katie Cassidy as Amanda

Home Release Date

• May 12, 2009
• Pierre Morel

Distributor

• 20th Century Fox

Movie Review

What do you do if your 17-year-old daughter flies to Paris with another teen friend and is kidnapped by sex traffickers within hours of arriving? Well, if you’re retired CIA agent Bryan Mills, you go get her—brutally dispatching every one of the interlopers involved. That’s the premise in Taken .

But let’s rewind the tape a bit.

Bryan Mills was a good CIA agent. But until now, he hasn’t been such a great father. Years spent overseas have taken a toll on his family relationships. So on the eve of daughter Kim’s 17th birthday, he’s turned over a new leaf: retiring from the Agency and moving to Los Angeles, where he hopes to repair the damage his absence has done. His five-year marriage to Kim’s mom went up in smoke years ago. But he clings to the idea that devoting all his energy and affection to Kim might somehow salvage something . Anything.

Before he can get started, though, Kim hatches a plan of her own: a trip to Europe with her best bud Amanda to see Paris and stay with her cousins there. Her world-wary dad doesn’t like the idea one bit. But his daughter’s enthusiasm and his ex-wife’s haranguing make him relent—on the condition that Kim calls him daily with updates on her whereabouts.

She, of course, forgets his instructions the moment her plane touches down on French soil. And soon, she and Amanda meet a nice, helpful young Frenchman named Peter who graciously offers to share a cab with them and split the fare.

Kim and Amanda have hardly said goodbye to Peter and begun to unpack at her cousins’ commodious abode (they’re not home) when the phone rings: Dad. Kim’s annoyance with her hyper-vigilant father, however, melts into desperation when she witnesses Amanda being kidnapped in another room.

“There’s someone here. Oh my god, they got Amanda. They’re coming.”

“All right,” Dad instructs. “Listen to me. Go to the next bedroom, under the bed. Tell me when you’re there. Now, the next part is very important: They’re going to take you.”

And they do.

Positive Elements

Throughout Taken , Bryan demonstrates deep devotion to Kim—both before and after her abduction. We watch as he looks longingly at old birthday pictures and home movies of her. Knowing that she longs to be a pop singer, he gets Kim a state-of-the-art karaoke machine and uses a hard-won connection to give her a leg up in the industry. But far beyond that, Bryan’s ferocious love for his daughter compels him past every obstacle once she’s been abducted.

With help from CIA friends, Bryan learns that Kim’s kidnappers are likely a group of human traffickers from Albania … and that he has about 96 hours to find her before she disappears into the black hole of sex slavery. And so he uses clues from his short conversation with one of her kidnappers to piece together, CSI -style, important clues that eventually point the way to her location.

In the process, Taken shines a revelatory light on the scourge of human trafficking, a ruthless underworld where even one innocent mistake condemns a girl to a life of drugged sex bondage. Further to its credit, the filmmakers exercise some restraint in the ways they depict these young women’s forced prostitution. (More on that in “Sexual Content.”)

In his search for Kim, Bryan rescues a young woman who’s ended up with Kim’s coat. He takes her to a hotel room where he sets up an IV to help get the drugs out of her system. Bryan is motivated in part by his need for information from the woman, but it’s clear that he’s tenderly treating her the same way he would his own daughter.

Sexual Content

Amanda excitedly tells Kim that she intends to sleep with Peter. And she chides Kim for clinging to her virginity, saying, “You gotta lose it sometime, it might as well be in Paris.” After Kim is kidnapped, we learn that she’ll fetch a much higher price on the sex-slave market because she’s been inspected and found to be “pure.”

Bryan feigns propositioning a prostitute in Paris, and their conversation includes sex-related euphemisms. (We see her and several others in garish, revealing clothes.) Later, he discovers a brothel of sorts where newly “recruited” girls are forced into small, curtain-separated cubicles as a long line of “customers” waits to have sex with them. Bryan pulls curtains back from several of these dens to reveal women in various states of undress as men paw at them. There’s no explicit nudity, but the implications are horrific.

Women wear cleavage-baring outfits. A pop star wears a short skirt, and is later seen in a bathrobe. Kim and several others (presumably also virgins) are auctioned off in a dark room. We briefly see Kim in a bra and panties, another girl in a G-string and bra. The girls are later veiled and dressed in a sort of ceremonial garb as they’re presented to a sheikh who’s purchased them.

We hear several crude references to sexual anatomy.

Violent Content

Liam Neeson (who plays Bryan) is remarkably believable as a former CIA agent who has, in his own words, honed a “particular set of skills.” What he means is this: He knows how to kill.

Once Bryan picks up his daughter’s trail, the ensuing violence is nonstop and intense, if not particularly gory (probably the only thing that preserved this film’s surprising PG-13 rating). Bryan takes down a slew of baddies with guns. Others get stabbed in the chest. He breaks the necks of quite a few; even more are knocked out (if not killed) as he slams their heads into various hard objects—or coldcocks them with a gun. Several melees involve intense fist-and-foot combat flurries. Bryan crushes bad guys’ tracheas twice. A man fleeing him on a freeway suddenly gets plastered by a semi. Two reckless car chases involve Bryan piloting stolen vehicles against traffic on a French freeway. In one chase, a man rams his truck into the protruding prongs of a front-end loader’s scoop.

Another skill Bryan has perfected? Forcibly extracting information. In one scene, a kidnapper sitting on a metal chair is repeatedly subjected to electroshock torture as Bryan questions him about Kim’s whereabouts (threatening to pull his fingernails out if he doesn’t come clean). Even after the man confesses everything he knows and pleads for mercy, Bryan flips the electrical switch back on … and then leaves the room for good.

Also worth noting: Bryan shoots a man in the head who’s holding a young woman hostage. The coercive abductions of Kim and Amanda are disturbing. Bryan eventually finds Amanda, but she’s already died of a forced drug overdose.

A former colleague named Jean-Claude, who’s now high up in the French security agency, refuses to help Bryan and is intent upon arresting him. In a shocking scene that could have come straight out of TV’s 24 , Bryan shoots the man’s wife in the arm (“It’s just a flesh wound,” he helpfully explains) to force Jean-Claude to cough up information he needs.

Crude or Profane Language

Five s-words. About a dozen misuses of God’s name. (Once it is paired with “d–n.”) Roughly 10 other vulgarities are uttered (“a–hole,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p—“), and Bryan makes an obscene gesture.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Several henchmen from the sex-trafficking ring drink beer. A couple of scenes show people drinking wine and champagne at parties. Abducted women have clearly been drugged and are kept perpetually incapacitated. We see a needle going into a girl’s arm as Bryan sets up an IV for her.

Other Negative Elements

Bryan flouts both laws and ethics in his efforts to save Kim. He repeatedly steals cars, breaks into houses and endangers innocent civilians in car chases. The film implies that these choices are all acceptable given the gravity of his mission.

Bryan discovers that Kim has lied to him about her intentions in Europe. She and Amanda have actually planned to follow U2 around the continent—a plan her mother was in on and which she kept from Bryan because of his past attempts at controlling Kim’s behavior.

Jean-Claude is depicted as a well-heeled bureaucrat whose only concern is for his family’s comfort. It’s implied that the Frenchman is aware of the sex trafficking going on in Paris, but he’s doing nothing to stop it because many of those with whom he works are profiting from it and his job security depends on his passive inaction.

Taken deserves credit for decrying the horrors of sex trafficking, a subject that has received increasing press coverage recently. According to imdb.com , actress Famke Janssen (who plays Bryan’s ex-wife) was inspired by her participation in the film to get involved with this heartrending problem, to the point of becoming a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Office Against Drugs and Crime. It’s conceivable that some who see this film will be similarly moved.

But while Taken ‘s subject matter is all too real, the solution proffered here is pure Hollywood fantasy. Liam Neeson is part Jason Bourne, part Charles Bronson and part Jack Bauer. And if 24 ‘s Jack Bauer has tried to teach us anything, it’s that the end justifies the means. As long as your cause is just, you can do anything you want to the bad guys. Anything.

That’s definitely Bryan Mills’ modus operandi . His foes are bad, bad men who cavalierly destroy women’s lives for money. It’s not personal, it’s just business, one loathsome broker tells Bryan. So it’s hard to shed any tears when Bryan breaks their necks, smashes their throats, stabs them and shoots them. These men deserve all that and more, right?

Neeson echoed these sentiments in an interview with madeinatlantis.com . “As a father, you can’t imagine anything worse,” he said. “Of course, you wonder what your own reaction would be in that situation. You picture what you’d do to her kidnappers, and you soon come to the conclusion that you’d do anything in your power to save your child. I found this particularly interesting territory, because I’m traditionally against violence, especially the kind of violence Bryan resorts to in the movie. But it’s a case of ‘them or me’ and Bryan takes that situation to its logical conclusion.”

The film asks us to believe that Bryan’s killing spree in pursuit of Kim is something more than mere vigilantism, something akin to righteous retribution. And in the process it invites us to revel in the brutal beat down Bryan administers—mortally—over and over and over again.

So I wonder how many people will walk out of this film constructively brooding over the wicked underworld of forced sexual slavery. I think it’s more likely that they’ll leave with a mixture of surging adrenaline and voyeuristic satisfaction after Bryan makes good on his promise to his daughter’s abductors: “I will find you. And I will kill you.”

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

Latest Reviews

Spy x Family Code: White

Villains Inc.

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Weekly reviews straight to your inbox.

Taken Review

26 Sep 2008

NaN minutes

Liam Neeson’s ill-judged presence should not cause you to even consider going within 30 feet of a fleapit that’s screening Taken. Here he plays an ex-spy divorcé who’s desperate to make up years of parental neglect to his daughter (an over-aged Maggie Grace). This involves Daddy creepily obsessing over her 17th-birthday present, trying to facilitate her childhood ambition to become “a singer” (this involves saving a pop star imaginatively named ‘Diva’ - Holly Valance, remember her? - from a crazed fan), and agonising over the fact that she wants to spend her summer holidaying in Europe. Terrifying, terrifying Europe.

Yet to Europe - specifically Paris - she goes, where within minutes of landing she and her slutty (read: dead-meat) pal are hoodwinked by a slimy Frenchman and kidnapped by sneering Albanian gangsters whose intention is to hook their victims on skag and sell them to cold-eyed Arabs for white-girlie sex. Turns out Daddy - paranoid parent and towering xenophobe that he is - was right. If a good little teenaged Caucasian strays even an inch beyond the mighty US of A’s borders, she’s pale prey to every godless, sex-mad, drug pushing foreigner out there. Hell, even Daddy’s ol’ French-spy buddy can’t be relied upon to help; he’s French! “Jean-Claude, I’ll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to!” growls Daddy, like a true American. Despite speaking with an Irish accent, this guy bleeds stars and shits stripes. He’s from a land where actions speak louder than words… So cue an hour or so of him brutally pummelling every foreigner who stands in his way, stopping only to torture a few. He even deliberately shoots one utterly innocent bystander. Call it friendly fire. Or rather, don’t. If you took Commando and replaced all its humour (intentional  or otherwise) with snarling hatred, you’d end up with Taken - a risible male-re-empowerment fantasy set in a world where a fatal headshot and rescue from a life of inter-racial rape is the best way to win back your daughter’s heart.

Interestingly, it’s directed by a Frenchman (Pierre Morel) and produced by his longtime accomplice, Luc Besson. On the evidence of this, they’re now either self-hating freedom-fries munchers, or just knowingly manipulating US prejudices in the name of entertainment. We suspect the latter.

Related Articles

Movies | 07 04 2020

Movies | 10 10 2019

Movies | 05 11 2018

Movies | 31 05 2018

Movies | 22 05 2018

Movies | 08 08 2017

Movies | 13 05 2016

Movies | 23 02 2016

• Become a Critical Movie Critic
• Movie Review Archives

Movie Review: Taken (2008)

• General Disdain
• Movie Reviews
• 108 responses
• --> July 29, 2008

There’s a new action star in town and it isn’t anyone you would immediately suspect. Does the name Liam Neeson ring a bell? Yes, the same guys who has primarily played the nondescript role for the majority of his career has found his John McClane as Bryan in the French action, quasi-thriller Taken .

Surprisingly, it isn’t as bad as you may think . . .

Neeson is a retired CIA operative trying to piece together his broken family. After his intense career, his wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) has left him and remarried and he’s all but a stranger to his 17 year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). He finds the only way to reconnect with her and make peace with his ex-wife is to go against his better judgment and allow for Kim to travel to France with her girlfriends. He should have stood his ground though, because shortly after landing in the City of Lights, Kim and her friend are kidnapped by Albanians and sold as sexual playthings to the fabulously rich and the insanely powerful.

What follows next is a nice change of pace (the broken family man shtick gets old quick) as Bryan hauls ass to Paris to begin his hunt for the abductors. He dons his Sherlock Holmes hat and cape, and conducts some impressive detective work (which is sprinkled with some extreme luck). First, he goes to the kidnapping location and gets led to the man responsible for setting the girls up. Next, using his contacts in the French police he makes his way to a sex camp which in turn leads to a holding/drug house which leads to another link in the chain which invariably leads to another link (I don’t want to give it all away). What’s important is at each stop Bryan beats the living shit out of everyone within reach. Some of it is completely far-fetched (fighting a roomful of thugs armed with semi-automatic weapons unarmed) and some of it is pain-wretchingly real (anyone care for some home-brewed electrocution?).

Neeson does an admirable job as Taken ‘s human battering ram (undoubtedly some of his skill comes from what he learned on the set of Batman Begins ). I must say, he carries himself well for a 56 year-old man. His moves are not as precise or as crisp as what I’d expect from the ass-kicking hero, but they’re good enough to get by with. Everyone else in the film is a throwaway napkin. Director Pierre Morel could have switched them around or substituted monkeys in their place without causing much of a problem since, aside from from the beginning of the movie, there is very little interaction between characters. The only thing missing was the wise-cracking remarks that are staples in the “kick ass and ask questions later” type of movie. But while they were notably absent, I can’t say I missed them a whole lot (probably due to the fact that these “witty” one-liners have steadily gotten worse and worse).

So its no Die Hard . So what – nothing is. It’s no James Bond flick either. What Taken is, is a good middle of the road action movie, that is on par with the likes of Seagal’s and Snipe’s finest (i.e., Under Siege and Passenger 57 ). It also proves to the rest of us (mostly me) that there is more to France than fine wines, croissants and surrender flags.

I'm an old, miserable fart set in his ways. Some of the things that bring a smile to my face are (in no particular order): Teenage back acne, the rain on my face, long walks on the beach and redneck women named Francis. Oh yeah, I like to watch and criticize movies.

Movie Review: Ghosted (2023) Movie Review: Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) Movie Review: Fantasy Island (2020) Movie Review: Snatched (2017) Movie Review: Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) Movie Review: ABCs of Death 2 (2014) Movie Review: Life After Beth (2014)

'Movie Review: Taken (2008)' have 108 comments

July 31, 2008 @ 12:29 pm Atomic Popcorn

Now how did you see this already? And are you able to post up a review prior to the launch. If so contact me I want in hehe. My rules are day of launch of the film.

Log in to Reply

July 31, 2008 @ 7:07 pm General Disdain

Movie was released a few months ago actually. It just hasn’t opened on any screens in the states yet.

August 13, 2008 @ 7:01 am ARt

LOL! Classic way to end a movie review. :D

September 22, 2008 @ 11:36 am Robert

Is this a joke????!!!!!!!

This movie rocks… the only weak point is the job from the girl that makes te daugther of Liam Nesson that tottally sucks… I have to say it.. this review really sucks

September 23, 2008 @ 2:44 pm General Disdain

I have to say it.. this review really sucks

Why exactly does this review really suck?

September 29, 2008 @ 1:48 am Bardha

i think the movie is great… but just to let u audiences know that albanians arent cold hearted the way they pictuerd them to be in the movie…. and were also not that desperate for money or … either than giving us albanians a bad name and makin this movie box officee hit in serbia its a good movie…

September 29, 2008 @ 5:45 pm Sammy

Do the French have police? With so much public violence I should think a police officer or two would show up on the scene. I don’t recall even hearing a siren!

October 1, 2008 @ 6:26 am Chris McCrory.

IN ALL HONESTY THIS REVIEW HAS OBVIOUSLY BEEN WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO HAS VERY LITTLE UNDERSTANDING OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD AND EASTERN EUROPEAN DOMINANCE IN CAPITAL CITIES WITH REGARDS TO ORGANISED CRIME. THIS MOVIE WAS FANTASTIC, IT HAD A VERY CREDIBLE STORYLINE AND AN EXCEPTIONAL CAST. THIS IS WITHOUT DOUBT THE BEST ACTION/THRILLER I HAVE SEEN IN TEN YEARS OR MORE. LIAM NEESON DESERVES AN OSCAR/OSCARS!!!!!!

CHRIS, BELFAST..

October 3, 2008 @ 7:41 am General Disdain

Albanians arent cold hearted? ;D

I think there were some cops in a few scenes; just not very many of them.

@ Chris McCrory

What does my lack of European knowledge have to do with my review? And no, Liam Neeson does not deserve an Oscar.

October 5, 2008 @ 1:25 pm mel

this movie was actually really good, however it did potray albanians in a very bad way. In actual fact we are NOT like that at all, and you have to take in to account that this is how hollywood makes the “bad guys” seem. We are anything but cold hearted. :)

October 12, 2008 @ 4:49 pm mlee

Great movie, very nice script. I agree Liam Neeson’s duaghter inthe movie was the worse part. Her acting was not good. She acted very childish for a seventeen year old.

October 13, 2008 @ 4:37 am marius

How in the world was this movie good? Did you see it at least? Is like Steven Seagal on steroids..Too bad for Liam Neeson. I used to consider him a serious actor.

October 14, 2008 @ 8:10 am Bekim

i just sow thif film and its looks cool,

as you are right all who makes this kaind of movies for albanians.

becouse we dont have goverment to put all of you in the court.

and we are kaind of poor as a goverment.

as we are the people we cant do nothing,

you can do more and more about albanian and make a bad name becouse its all the albanian goverment foult.

October 16, 2008 @ 10:09 pm Gloria Nielsen

I agree with the reviewer who said those who did not rate this film highly have no understanding of the reality of life in Europe. This movie portrayed a very realistic account of what happens to girls who are innocently caught up in the sex slave trade. It could happen to anyone including young boys. Unfortunately, whilst I am certain that not all Albanians are “bad”, it is the Albanians who are renowned for this type of recruitment, and whilst all Arabs are not “bad” either, sadly, it is the ultra rich Arabs who are predominately on the market for this kind of sex trade. What the movie did not portray was what happens to these girls after they have passed their “üse-by” date, if they have not succumbed to drug overdose. Many are never heard of again. This movie is a must see for our young people heading overseas – only the chase and action scenes were overplayed, and the girl being fortunate enough to have a father who rescued her – the rest was spot on.

October 18, 2008 @ 4:14 am Bardha

Its actualy isnt the albanians governments fault for any of this… im 99.9% sure dat da director or writer is or has a friend thats serbian for this wouldnt be all based on albanians… and it doesnt just happen in Europe it happends very wea around the world… IM albanian so i dont want movies like this disgracing my culture and country… this movies good but its not just albanians who do stuff like this, so dont judge albanians by this movie….

October 20, 2008 @ 4:03 pm Gareth

I agree with you robert is this review a joke? The film isnt just a middle of the road action thriller how can you call yourself a reviewer maybe a complete fool yes definately. I have been to see this film twice now as i think its one of the best films to come out for ages. It doesnt just cruise through the film with violence, it brings up some good points which people need to know about our world like trafficing girls, its bloody disgusting and at least this film touches on this subject. I agree die hard it isnt but then die hard doesnt really have any morallistic views does it FOOL!!!

October 20, 2008 @ 4:36 pm marius

gareth: no offense dude, but I would have banned your ass after such a language also u are missing the point: this movie wasn’t suppose to be a documentary on human traffic and the reviews on this blog are more about the movies and the actors. Got it?

October 20, 2008 @ 6:10 pm General Disdain

My lack of knowledge for European life had no bearing on how I rated the film. I based my review on the merits of it being a good action movie.

@ Bekim & Bardha

Stereotypes are everywhere. Yours apparently coincides with the sex trade.

I’m a fool for thinking the movie was good but not great? Guess that’s why they say opinions are like assholes…

October 21, 2008 @ 7:29 am Il Voce

How can anyone call this film realistic? Middle-class white American girls do not get trafficked. Besides, by the time Neeson’s character gets to his daughter, she would have been passed around like currency. I didn’t see that happen.

October 21, 2008 @ 2:53 pm Dianne

Did you not understand that the girl was not “passed around like currency” because she was a virgin – and virgins were kept for being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Also, did you not hear the comment earlier in the movie, where they explained that whereas the trafficking used to be (and still is)tricking Eastern European girls into believing they were being hired into legitimate work, it has become easier and less costly to target innocent girls hopping of a plane, or train etc. from anywhere in the world.

October 22, 2008 @ 10:00 am Logan

For me TAKEN is one of the best films of the year, simple fact. The action was amazing and it just doesn’t let up for one second. The coldness and calmness under pressure that Liam Neeson exhibits is truly breathtaking. The film doesn’t indulge in long winded fight scenes that go on and on, instead they were short, quick and deadly. The speedy solutions that Neeson’s character uses time and time again were truly film gold and should be respected by all who see it. No rocket launchers or stupid car jumps here, he takes out more adversaries here with chops to the throat and broken arms than I could count and the film has realism and real life situations by the bucket load. There are some corny moments in the beginning and right at the end, but from the moment the action starts to the moment it ends you will be impressed and on the edge of your seat, guaranteed. It raises issues about prostitution and people trafficking but it isn’t a documentary and doesn’t pretend to be. This really is a great film and I would give it a full 5 stars. Go and see it and make up your own mind.

November 6, 2008 @ 7:53 pm Mobo

I really can’t stand the stereotypical i-don’t-get-a-scratch-on-me-but-if-i-do-i-just-get-even-better kinda kick-ass, karate, Jean “Rambo” Seagull muslegay shit! But.. For once it was a non-stereotype actor, Mr. Neeson, doing some (quite surprisingly) very delightful, well-deserved, neck-breaking, scum-killing ass kicking. So, I for one found this movie quite entertaining. Liam is THE punisher in this flic! Agreed, he has some ridiculously lucky, very well timed moments.. And yeah, it’s overrated at IMDB.. And yes, it does have some errors (She’s a virgin?! Errm, police? He can just leave the country, no questions asked? A virgin, really?).. Well I didn’t really care, I was cheering for him all the way “you go get those Albanian mofo’s, yeah!” :D

November 7, 2008 @ 3:19 am bruno

just saw this movie. Thought it was pretty good. Lots of action, why tha fuck do you need dialogue in action movies? it was action packed, and Lian was awesome, very scary and ruthless;

” I have gained a set of skills that would make me a nightmare for a man like you” awesome, I knew just from that short line that he was going to kick some ass.

good review overall.

November 8, 2008 @ 7:04 am General Disdain

why tha fuck do you need dialogue in action movies?

You don’t!

November 11, 2008 @ 7:22 pm Sokol

I’m Albanian and thoroughly enjoyed it. Great movie, action, broken necks, diy electrocution, love it. One thing, we all need some reality escaped once in a while, but i really wished that some of it happened for real. In other words, I quite like to see it live or some sort of documentary where pimps are tortured with medieval tools, like giant smoldering logs are stuffed up their asses, you know stuff like that. As far as national pride is concerned, a pimp is a pimp, the lowest of the lowest and deserve proper man agment,no mater where they’re from. Last line for General Disdain Your comment sir :Stereotypes are everywhere. Yours apparently coincides with the sex trade.’ with all due respect, go get stuffed. Regards Sokol

November 11, 2008 @ 9:20 pm General Disdain

Twas a joke, my friend.

November 13, 2008 @ 4:45 pm MovieGoblin

One of the BEST movie’s I have EVER seen. This reviewer is a joke for not rating it higher. Die Hard? ha! This blows Die Hard out of here.

November 13, 2008 @ 5:33 pm General Disdain

One of the BEST movie’s I have EVER seen.

I guess it is safe to say you haven’t seen many movies then. By the way, Die Hard is a much better action movie.

November 21, 2008 @ 9:38 am US

This movie is really an eye opener for young generation heading to overseas. There is no doubt now that I would be careful dealing with Albanians in future. As someone mentioned before, not all Albanians are bad…but better safe than sorry.

November 24, 2008 @ 10:46 pm Leaonidus4Glory

Great movie. Must say a one of the better ones iv seen in a while. Just wierd how the release date is January 30 2009. Anypoop enjoyed the movie some good action and shit. Pretty sure the Albanians are all bad haha jk people.(there actually pretty nice) But talk about sick the old bastard being greedy and buying three. Sick.

November 28, 2008 @ 4:58 am E

I really liked the movie. One of the better movies I’ve seen in a while. Great action throughout the whole movie and Liam Neeson did a great job. If you like action, this movie is up there.

November 29, 2008 @ 9:54 am Gareth

Message for marius. Marius whoever you are my comment has got nothing to do with you i was having a dig at the reviewer so why dont you keep your big nose out. Have you ‘Got it’? now boy.

December 1, 2008 @ 2:03 pm Alicia

This is the great eye-opening movie for young women.

Many affluent Americans & Canadians have no idea what “sex-trafficking” is even about before they see this movie. Yet it is “epidemic” in certain parts of Europe. Although it was common in Arabia and Eastern countries, now it is almost epidemic in European cities and has finally trickled into San Diego, Montreal and the state of Connecticut.

Unfortunately, it will become more common & it will become more common in the news (Little Madeline McCann was taken from her apartment in Portugal and many experts believe it was a sex trafficking ring for pedophiles).

My aunt saw hundreds these trafficked girls in public places in Arabia during the 1970s (with their Achilles tendons cut so they could not run away). Because it is such a lucrative business, the corruption with public officials is wide spread and well known.

December 1, 2008 @ 4:12 pm Gloria

Thank you Alicia for your intelligent comments on this movie. It is time more people became aware of this very sad situation. The movie portrayed a very realistic view of this.

December 6, 2008 @ 4:40 pm greta

In my opinion, the movie rocks it has a great storyline, a great history, and a great hero, but the girl(maggie grace) who plays liam neesen’s daughter did an awful job. she portrayed the 17-year ol girl as 10. she seamed really naiive and childish and irresponsible for her age since she kept on running around like a 3 year-old. sorry but a lousy choice for an actress.

December 17, 2008 @ 6:09 pm nagui

This is definitely the worst so-called action movie i have ever seen, my friends woke me up twice during the movie,liam neeson is mr. Know and do it all,a fake jack bauer, the director watched too much of 24(obviously when drunk),a good movie for 12 year olds.i could not believe xander berkeley would trade georges mason for THIS 2 LINE ROLE.I THINK 56 IS A GOOD AGE TO RETIRE FOR NEESON,OR AT LEAST PLAY GRANDPA ROLES NOT ACTION,and i thought the daughter was going to kinder garden and not paris,anyway a total waste of 90 minutes and i believe the critics that have seen it share my opinion.screw u Rony for recommending this movie.

Naguizzzz and Naylazzzzzzzzz Lebanon

December 18, 2008 @ 8:36 pm marek connell

Well, is this a good movie? Yes it is fantastic. I replayed the part where Liam told Marko “I spoke to you 2 days ago. I told you I’d find you” over & over again. I think that this film more than the Die Hards highlights the lengths that a parent will go to to protect/ save their children ( being an ex-mean mother-chucker definitely makes it easier to achieve this goal. The portrayal of ALBANIANS in this film is obviously not favourable however Western films will always point the finger in another direction (The Hostel-Slovakia to name but one). What mustn’t be over-looked is the fact that the king-pins of the whole “Business” are not Albanian (Western/ Europeans & Arabs are also implicated) Neeson’s desk ridden French colleague is all to aware of what is going on too. The most disturbing point of this film (as Hostel possibly was too-I hope not) is that these kind of demonic businesses exist and they involve people all the way to the top of the food chain. And unfortunately just like all tragedies that befall mankind, they are the consequence of individuals who turn the other way to receive their paycheck and take care of their own. A fantastic film. Liam definitely deserves much recognition for this film that almost slipped through my radar. All responses welcome. Marek C

December 18, 2008 @ 8:46 pm marek connell

1 more thing tho-the ending at the airport was very unconvincing-That was probably the worst part of the film-There was no sense of agony, of overwhelming relief from the parents that their daughter had been rescued from a life of slavery and a horrible death. Yes Liam doesn’t get a scratch on him while he notches up his body count but the director is very clever in dropping hints in the first quarter of the film that he is leathal. Would/ could anyone survive such a blood bath in real life? Maybe not but I’ve heard stories where a mother, single handedly picked up a car to save her child underneath it. I wish Liam was my dad. Or maybe I wish I were a dad like Liam.

January 2, 2009 @ 1:03 am Silencer

Very good movie. One of the best this year actually. Watch it. I highly recommend this movie! again… watch it. You won’t regret watching it.

January 4, 2009 @ 1:57 pm John Reeves

“It also proves to the rest of us (mostly me) that there is more to France than fine wines, croissants and surrender flags.”

– The words of an idiot

January 4, 2009 @ 3:42 pm General Disdain

The words of an idiot

Indeed. Who does that guy think he is?

January 12, 2009 @ 4:06 am mike

ohh yeaa believe, im albanian……and albanians could be even worsee. their exatly as the movie potrayes them as….especially the dibrans. But we cant stereotype all albanians as bad. Their are also really good albanians with good hearts, but this movie shows only the low life scummy albanians. This movie was sickkk and i love every sec of it. MORE MORE MORE

January 14, 2009 @ 8:27 am Nika

This movie was really good, and of course people have moveis before they come out all the time

January 15, 2009 @ 4:29 pm george p

This is a comment for all of those who see the 17 year old daughter as childish… Well, I know, in real life, 20 year olds who are even childish… I’m not a human behavior expert, but i think it has something to do with the environment, childhood experience, “being the only child”, or even the way parents nurture their kids. So, we there are 17 year old who are childish and at the same time, there are also those who have matured early. Also being the youngest child could greatly affect the traits of a person. With regards to my comment about the movie, It’s great and it keeps you at the edge of your seat but their are loopholes that I should point out. First, the movie has indeed filled with extreme luck! It’s like the movie Independence Day where characters where able to protect the earth due to luck. Second, the character of Liam seemed to be the only person who knows how to shoot guns and hit bullseyes. Whereas, bad guys with extreme guns on the film seemed to be unlucky to hit the protagonist even if they already have a clear shot. Too bad, they might be just plain unlucky to hit the target (blame it on the too biased script). Third, you may laugh in this comment but this is insanely true. After all Liam Neeson’s character did, he was just left there at the airport and took a cab and ride home alone. How pathetic the mother and adoptive father of the girl for not even giving a “hero’s ride”. The script was totally “inhuman here.” So cold-hearted.But, overall, I was hooked with the fast-paced storytelling here.

January 17, 2009 @ 9:16 am is this seat taken

This movie was absolutely ridiculous….action and the bad guys getting killed, yes——but not believable at all….silly.

January 22, 2009 @ 8:27 pm ACTION_STAR

GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME! BEST EVER! AND TO THE ONE SAYING DIE HARD IS A GREAT ACTION MOVIE? HOW CAN YOU RATE AN ALL CGI FILE TO BE A GOOD ACTION MOVIE?

January 22, 2009 @ 11:46 pm efe

i’ve seen this movie. i saw it a while ago. a verrrrry long time ago! i was suprised to see it being advertised on t.v as coming out in cinemas on the 30th! how does thos happen?

January 24, 2009 @ 4:41 am General Disdain

All CGI? Die Hard came before the computerized action revolution.

Film has a late release in the states. Came out in EU last year.

January 25, 2009 @ 12:12 am opinion8er

This movie was the best film I’ve seen in a long time. The cast was outside the realms of the hollywood spotlights and glamour, media. This actually made the film much better as it actually touched home, and made it that much more realistic, sort of a cozy action flick, this was absolutley brilliant. This film is rated a 9/10 in my opinion, much better than all the hollywood crap thats out now, open your eyes and compare the shit thats in the theatres, (and I’m talking with big name stars), there’s no comparison. Too much garbage in the theatres now, I don’t give a shit whos face is on the screen, I would preffer watching a cast thats slightly out of the spot lights, makes for a much better film. Unexpected performances tend to keep me more on the edge of my seat. Rather than the usuall (already know what to expect) bullshit some of the bigger stars tend to give. THIS MOVIE KICKS ASS! Barnone best flick of 2008-2009.

January 28, 2009 @ 12:02 pm keith

THIS WAS THE BEST MOVIE IVE EVER SEEN

January 30, 2009 @ 4:38 pm Dave

I just saw Taken. It was very very entertaining. Jason Bourne meets Steve Segal. Neeson does a great job. Worth it!

January 31, 2009 @ 10:14 pm alljackedup

Loved the film. A great escape from my Mid American business life. But let me qualify myself as an expert on such films. If I had a dollar for every loose truth based spy novel I’ve read and enjoyed, I would be wealthy. Good enough qualification?

A couple inconsitencies though for you other fans:

1. Why did he not persue the other spotter (black guy)after the young Frenchman got killed by the truck? 2. Why would the (not actually) Albanians in the kitchen believe he was a French official when he spoke to them with a Scottish brogue? 3. How did the Sheik know which of the 3 girls was the daughter? 4. And lastly, what was the body count?

January 31, 2009 @ 11:28 pm Michele

Ok…The movie ROCKED! The plot was great. Human trafficking does happen all over the world…DUH…But THIS movie took place in London and the “bad guys” were Albanian. But how many movies have we seen with Asian, Arab, African, Russian, etc…countries/cultures as the used as the story “bad guys” that are involved in human trafficking. Check out “Eastern Promises” and that ROCKED too! Review the movie and go to a human rights site and find a way to help human trafficking from happening if you really care. Stop trying to be all political on a movie review site.

February 3, 2009 @ 9:36 pm all you need is love

at US “This movie is really an eye opener for young generation heading to overseas. There is no doubt now that I would be careful dealing with Albanians in future. As someone mentioned before, not all Albanians are bad…but better safe than sorry.” are you serious?????? are you seriously THAT ignorant about the world??? who the heck worries..then my friend you should worry about EVERY single person you meet because they all come from some part of europe and asia (and australia) but incase you did not know MOST of europe is involved in disgusting human trafficking…and so is north america by the way…its just the scum…not only ONE country who is worrisome..dont be so ignorant as to assume that…that is just about the most stereotypical comment (and its not even a STEREOTYPE about albanians). generally they’re known for their mediterranean cultures and stuff …but hey if you wanna worry…dont get close to ANYONE ok?!! after all..better safe then sorry right?

February 4, 2009 @ 7:04 am Cat

very good movie

February 8, 2009 @ 9:20 pm smudge

The ALBANIANS were Albanian effing MUSLIMS. Did you notice the tattoos they showed several times? This movie was painful for me to watch. I had a relevant close encounter with some Arab men in NYC in the 1970’s.

February 9, 2009 @ 4:02 am Smiffy55

I saw this at the weekend and it must be one of the worst films I’ve seen. I should say that I’m no expert in the world of action movies but this didn’t even come close to the level of the Bourne films or Vanishing Point. It was just the filming of the action from a Computer Game. Did anyone actually care about whether he saved his daughter? She and her friend were airheads from a smug, selfish family. Frankly I hoped it would end with a twist but of course there was no chance of a surprise ending. Key messages: – Don’t leave America, it’s dangerous out there. – All foreigners are murderous or corrupt. – It’s okay to torture and shoot everyone, including the wife of an old colleague. In fact it’s the ultimate statement of the doctrine of the American regime.

February 9, 2009 @ 4:33 pm Mel

I’m sure that the Albanians would have been Muslim seeing as the tatoo was clearly shown and that they were from the north of Albania. However you must bear in mind that this is a Hollywood film we’re talking about and the majorty of Albanians are Christian and are not invloved in any form of “trafficking”. A lot of propoganda is used now-a-days and obviously as the audience we would really dislike the “bad guys”, but then again this is expected from America to potray a film in this way. -Just wanted to let you know :)

February 9, 2009 @ 10:10 pm General Disdain

A lot of propoganda is used now-a-days and obviously as the audience we would really dislike the “bad guys”, but then again this is expected from America to potray a film in this way.

Just thought I’d let you know, this film is not a Hollywood production. It is a French product.

February 11, 2009 @ 3:40 pm Sam Criswell

Taken is also reviewed in SMU’s Web site. Matt Carter calls it “a lighter, less intense “Bourne Identity.”

February 12, 2009 @ 1:13 am sue

this movie was great. i plan on seeing it again. someone mentioned eastern promises, i beleive this one is way better. as fa as albanians and sex trafficking. this is 100%true, this they also due human organ trafficking. I read online quotes from carla delponte’s book. when i read her book and saw the movie and heard from other people , seems like (not all) but enough albanians are vigalant animals!! be careful when traveling abroad

February 13, 2009 @ 6:37 am sn0m

Sue you need to educate yourself a bit, maybe a crush course in English to start with….. There are Albanian sex trafficers and organ trafficers like anywhere else in the world, but that doesn’t give you the right to make any sweeping statements. Let say I’ll make a stupid statement like all pub-going, chain-smoking, crack-head living in housing estate, single mothers in England are baby killers????? Do you understand how stupid it is to make such statements….. You also need to read a bit more before making any statements regarding Carla’s book as there is not a single shred of proof of evidence and as far as I am concern she is hiding behind her diplomatic immunity when challenged about it. However this is about the movie and not about non-fiction books that you can painfully manage to read and amuse yourself.

February 13, 2009 @ 3:14 pm mel

well said sn0m :)

February 13, 2009 @ 5:05 pm sue

snom- i get it your albanian, and you 100% right to be offended. i should of not stated all albanians, just i guess most of them. one thing why would carla hide behind her immunity? she is not on trial for anything. 2 albania has been under observation for a bit now in organ trafficking 2 albania is a hot spot in europe for drug trafficking sex drugs corruption it all goes together. it just happens that this movie taken which is a GREAT movie, happens to wxploit some of that. Americans in many foreign movies get displayed not that great , but what ever jsut brush it off its facts

February 14, 2009 @ 12:37 pm B

“i should of not stated all Albanians, just i guess most of them.” You can not judge an entire group of people or as you said, “most of them” on a movie. Each and every country has people that do wrong things but you can not say that most of them are (as you said) vigalant animals. Let me just say that I am Albanian and i find that comment incredibly offensive. Honestly, some of the people that have commented seem very ignorant about Albania. Stop judging people that you barely know anything about!

February 14, 2009 @ 1:20 pm sue

in regards to what you said B. the reason i say this is a few reasons one being what i said above about europe and albania is 100% true. another reason is i live in the suburbs of detroit michigan and you being albanian know there are alot of albanians here. so my experience living with them and working with them is more than enough reason. another is a good friend of mine whom is albanian maria, she married an american , her family disowned her no communication what so ever. she is another source some stuff she tells me is sick!! that sick albanian that turned the gas on in the house and killed his wife and kids for insurance money. she tells me at church , of the fights when people would take out there guns , shootings nad killings. this is from an albanian girl. like i said you’re right its not fair to judege them all , but when you here so many horrible things about a certain nationality it’s kind of hard not to judge.

February 15, 2009 @ 10:30 am Rambo

overall the movie was good… but there were lot of insignificant scene maybe.. scenes that are irrelevant.

February 16, 2009 @ 3:56 am Dan

First of the movie was very average. Many here tried to compare it against Die Hard and other movies such as Bourne Identity…well, this movie is no-where near those levels.

Besides the logical fallacies of the movie plot and some action scenes, the acting was of almost the entire supporting crew was very poor.

As for the Albanians, I’m myself one and by God I don’t see myself as a “viagalant animal”, it’s hard to convince people with a very limited knowledge that reality is much different from the fiction they choose to believe.

These “animals” Sue, did manage to give the world Mother Teresa; keep that in mind next time you let your fingers do the typing and your ass the thinking.

As for Del Ponte’s book, I’m surprised that you even know of it, as it is such an odd choice. This is widely considered as an urban myth, because if it was true some people would be going to jail by now. I take it you really don’t know much about it.

Lastly, as others have mentioned here, Europe is full of criminals from all over the world and unfortunately the most dangerous ones are the ones at the top of the food chain. This includes some of the people that you and me pay taxes to here in the states. So don’t be an ass and talk about the Albanians that way. If we are all to follow our stereotypes we would end up not talking to many people at all, especially in the US.

For the sake of us Albanians, please stay away from us, your stupidity might be infectious.

February 16, 2009 @ 5:15 pm sue

dan – the reason , i know of this is because i study political science. and europe is a major emphesis. so for me carls’ book is not an odd choice second, for organ trafficking, in europe it is an ordeal, with a case on it against albanians. so my as you said ass is not doing the talking. about politics you are 100% right about it it’s very corupt. and i did take back all albanians, but you being one should not a very vast amount are corrupt. but i canundrstand you’re offense because you are albanian. just as i would get offended when people spit at the usa, and americans. one more point when you said about corruption inamerica , this is correct, but did you know albanians have this biggest lobby in usa! checkmate

February 16, 2009 @ 8:57 pm sn0m

Oh dear, this is turning into a Sue versus Albanians contest, well I’m in for it, so you the others enjoy the spectacle. Sue there have been cases of organ trafficking in Albania. The one that I know was between gypsy kids (most of the times sold by their parents or relatives) and Greek doctors. They were sent to jail. Could there be others, possibly. So should you have any information either sent it to the police or post it here. As far as I know, the organ trafficking in Europe is done in the form of health turism, were sick patient do to India or Pakistan and come out with a new kidney or liver. As far as Carla’s book is concern, it talks about KLA (kosovan liberation army) using serb prisoners for organ harvesting in a house in north of Albania. It is a lot of bullandcowshit. A international tribunal team who was invited by the Albanian government did not find a single shred of evidence about it. When Carla was challenged about providing proof, she said that she is a Swiss diplomat now and is not allowed by low to speak about the issue…ahh?what? We in Albania think that this was cooked by the Serb propaganda machine to taint the liberation struggle of KLA and Albanian people. And by the way, there are thousands of Albanians that disappeared during serb occupation who I have the right to think that were used for organ trafficking, but do I have any proof, no so shtum… And a final advice, when you post here, please let the Microsoft spelling service, provided free of charge, to do the spelling and not your assss cas, seriously, it hurts reading your stuff. Regards Sokol

February 17, 2009 @ 7:48 pm Jen

I agree with Dan and B

February 18, 2009 @ 12:27 am sue

snom- you are funny , you say if i have info. hand it to the authorities. listen to yourself! of course carla lied in her book, of course they found nothing , of course its serb propaganda.. this is of course according to you. but to me since you said you are albanian, it sounds to me like albanian propaganda! i am sorry you can not deny the drug trafficking, women/girls kidnapped to be sold or made money on. it’s a reality it goes on, and albanins are not the only ones involved in it, but they’re involved.

February 18, 2009 @ 12:34 pm Hazel

I saw this movie last night. Just because there were some Albanians being bad guys in it does not mean it was saying all Albanians are bad. Just like watching bad Germans in Schindler’s list does not mean all Germans are bad. There were some bad guys.. they happened to be Albanian this time. Next time they could be from someplace else. This was an excellent movie. Not wooden acting. That’s for sure. Of course, with Neeson, it never is. He draws the audience mercilessly into every emotion he wants, like a master conductor. He drew empathy out of me as easily as Paris Hilton draws paparazzi. I often find the acting in action flicks about as riveting as watching grass grow. The action is great. And I like that, but give me some acting chops. Liam Neeson is amazing in everything he does. And kudos to whomever realized that a 56 year old actor can pull this off. I hate it when the audience is treated like we’re stupid and all we get is the same old thing over and over again. Gimme something fresh. Surprise me. Dammit! And finally… somebody did… and knew Neeson was a perfect choice. Thank you… and wow… it wasn’t Hollywood. Take the hint. We’re tired of cliches. If you give us something worth checking out, we’ll go… hey… I’m going to pay my money and see this again.

February 21, 2009 @ 1:30 pm a4l

albanians=G’s

February 22, 2009 @ 12:17 pm Burn the Witch

If you’re an offended Albanian or feeling sorry for the pride of Albania after watching a movie about a few Albanians, then get over your emo self.

It’s a movie, not a documentary.

February 26, 2009 @ 5:12 pm Dan

Whatever you say you can’t cover the fact that you try to generalize all Albanians. THAT is the fallacy in your logic, which you only realized later after you typed your first few comments.

Have a nice day!

March 9, 2009 @ 1:51 am don't behave steve

excellent acting, action, and plot.

the fight scenes are performed without hesitation, the key to this character’s behavior.

Director works well to tell the story and stay out of the way.

don’t behave steve

March 11, 2009 @ 3:29 pm alvin

it is defintely one of the best movie i have watched so far this year. Nothing business-like, just very personal shooting action. I like it for the fast pace and no-sense-ness.

and somehow it does feel right because the hero dad is under time pressure as well as to safeguard’s the daughter’s virginity before she loses it to some fat old man…. lol

March 16, 2009 @ 2:11 pm Bob

Saw this movie yesterday and left laughing. There are more plot holes than dead Albanians in this movie (and there are plenty of them). How Liam manages to kill all these baddies without spilling one drop of blood is a mystery and whoever is responsible for continuity in the film should never work again. And then there’s Maggie Grace: why Lost’s vixen, Shannon, was chosen to play a 17 year-old is another mystery – but I guess she needs the work. Poor Famke Janssen aint no Jean Grey in this movie; you sort of wish Liam would give her a well-deserved shot in the mouth. The final mystery is how Liam and the rescued Maggie emerge back home from an Air France terminal grinning like idiots after he has broken more laws than bones – OK, the French are a very forgiving people and yeah, the police were a tad corrupt, and maybe they were grateful that he single-handedly took care of that nasty sex-trade problem…Oh while I’m thinking about it, how stupid are these Albanians believing the old guy with the Irish accent is a French police inspector? And the ending, it’s hilarious!

March 19, 2009 @ 1:03 pm PRIS

THE BEST MOVIE I HAVE SEEN.. I LOVED IT!!!

March 20, 2009 @ 2:50 am dan

everyone who has written on this wall should read my review which is basically better than all of yours. you all need a life if youre spending time gossiping about a movie. its sad how lonely you peole must be. my name is cornelious and im amish, the only reason im doing this is cuz im high and my eyes look redder than the devils dick. i think you albanians are fuckin stupid for tryin to make this a racial matter, u sound retarted, and when i think of albanians now i think of an illiterate retard with a rubics cube. now fuck off or eat my mc cunt nuggets

March 25, 2009 @ 12:58 am TKBlock

I respect the critics review on this movie as well as others point of view of this movie. I have seen hundreds of action movies in my lifetime, but nothing, and I could not stress it enough, nothing held me down on my seat gasping for more than this movie. It was so good, after finishing the movie, I watched it again immediately. Everything fell into place. It was the first time I have felt so much sympathy to a movie character, it’s scary, and I’m not even a father yet.

March 28, 2009 @ 2:42 am Dad

This is a great film. Unfortunately most people that watched it are missing the moral of the story. They always seem to pinpoint and focus on what is far fetched or whatnot. The main point of this film is what great length would a father do to get his daughter back. Most of you wouldn’t understand. Everything that comes in between him and his daughter will receive the ultimate consequence.

April 2, 2009 @ 10:25 pm Unknown

Taken is a good movie. I watched it twice. It does not make me think that Albanians are bad people because it is just a movie. I learn something new from the movie about how people trafficking women, shout out what we see about the kidnappers and etc. Although the policemen seems like not doing their work in the movie but no movie is perfect. Just enjoy the movie, learn something from the movie if any and move on.

By the way, all races have good and bad people. That is a fact. I personally think we do not need to argue about that.

Your review is meaningless. Nothing but cursing.

April 7, 2009 @ 9:27 pm brad

just saw this movie and it is seriously the best movie ever. lot of action and just remember: GOOD LUCK

April 21, 2009 @ 9:19 am Jane

It was very good it stayed in my mind even long after the movie. I think its alot better than the crap movies that are made today. That was 1 of the best movies I’ve ever seen!

April 27, 2009 @ 3:57 am Fernanda Bendtsen

I usually dont post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful

May 24, 2009 @ 10:19 am Don W

This was a GREAT movie…I don’t like to watch movies again, but I will watch this one again!

May 25, 2009 @ 7:04 pm Finnster

Wow, almost everyone in this thread is either brain damaged, or never went to school. You guys need to learn some punctuation and spelling.

June 15, 2009 @ 2:54 am Gillie

Was a great action packed movie. Enjoyed the to-the-point role of the father. Was disappointed with the ending. Okay, maybe it could be assumed the daughter was recovering (although you wouldn’t know it from the ending), but I would have liked to have seen him get a lot more appreciation from the ex-wife or someone, government. Even another ending could have sufficed. Agents from the Embassy of France could have been waiting to pick him up for questioning. Just to dry for such a great beginning and middle. Let’s have a contest, who can come up with the best ending.

June 22, 2009 @ 12:13 pm JDS

One of the best action movies I’ve seen, and I’ve seen quite a few. Im neither Albanian nor American, but this movie strikes a chord.

Not quite sure what the reviewer was smoking when he wrote this, but it must be good.

– JDS

July 5, 2009 @ 2:04 pm June5Rose

Watched in spite of lukewarm reviews, but it turned out to be a winner. Any other actor but Liam Neeson would have made this action drama a B movie. With him it is A+++. Because of comments about Kimmie, I looked up Maggie Grace. She is 26, not a good choice for a 17 year old. Because she is tall, she looked silly wearing babydoll dresses, squeling and jumping like a kid, and riding a horse. She is irritating when you watch the movie over again. She came across as a spoiled rich kid, doing anything to get her way. Was she chosen instead of a younger girl because of “auction” scene? Agree with Gillie about dull ending. Parted at the air[port like acquaintences, instead of bonded family members. Even though the daughter went through hell, did they have to have soppy ending of meeting rock star?

July 13, 2009 @ 8:46 pm Winson

I already saw Taken two times and I really loved unbelievable ass kicking in this movie. I will not agree with the rating this movie has got here (seen better), but again its personal opinion how you approach watching a particular movie.

For me it was fast action packed movie and it was run by one man show Liam Neeson, who really played his character well. Overall must see movie.

My Rating: 8.5 out of 10

July 13, 2009 @ 9:09 pm club penguin

This movie portrayed a very realistic account of what happens to girls who are innocently caught up in the sex slave trade. It could happen to anyone including young boys. Unfortunately, whilst I am certain that not all Albanians are “bad”, it is the Albanians who are renowned for this type of recruitment, and whilst all Arabs are not “bad” either, sadly, it is the ultra rich Arabs who are predominately on the market for this kind of sex trade.

July 13, 2009 @ 9:26 pm Bardha

this is for “General Disdain” look im Albanian and even though were sweet and carin people i realy think u beta shut the fuck up with “Stereotypes are everywhere. Yours apparently coincides with the sex trade” shit..! before i stick my leg up ur ass.. We aint like that ok so don Fuck me off with that shit..! we dont cause trouble anywea because we dont let shit heads like u get to us cause were better then that.. so unles u want fucking trouble i suggest u apologize and shut da fuck up inda future aight..! Peacee.. :D:D

July 14, 2009 @ 6:02 am General Disdain

I smoke only the best.

There must be an element of truth to the stereotype, otherwise the movie would not have had Albanians as the sex traders.

July 15, 2009 @ 10:57 pm Bardha

Yeah well at least were doin a fuckin good job at it then fuckin piece of shit…! qifsha nanen e budallit hajt shko mytu naj kah bre kali.. :P:P:P hahahhahahahahahahah im lovin this… :D

July 27, 2009 @ 12:22 am jeshok

This movie is horrible. Extremely discrimanotory, racist, perpetuating ignorant fear ,and downright stupid.It is like the the ridiculous movie hostel, written by and for ignorant redneck Americans who have never traveled to Europe, and are made fearful to do so. I am so angered by this movie it makes me sick. Our world is a beautiful place, and any time I see something so ridiculously portraying the beauty of traveling, and causing any one to be fearful of it it makes me want to scream. do not watch it, it sucks. The chances of any of us being put in to this situation are as likely as our father’s being able to get us out of it, possibly even slimmer. Travel where ever you can, ignore stupid shit like this, watch quality movies, and take my advice, I have lived in many parts of the world. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Just be smart about stuff, read let’s go, on a shoestring, or any one of the other fabulous books that make it possible to travel without fear of being accosted by freaks.

August 20, 2009 @ 10:56 pm Kristin

I think this movie is quite good. The beginning was quite slow but it did explain the situation between father and daughter….

I did have a question though, and I know you want more feedback…BUT my boyfriend and I (are) watching the movie. In the beginning when the mother walks into the room while the father is on the phone, does she say “Will you go back to me” or “will you get back to me”. I am not sure!

September 5, 2009 @ 12:08 pm Honey

I loved the movie. I’m not a fan of action or the like but this really got me. Some parts are kind of unbelievable but they’re forgivable. I so love it.

September 25, 2009 @ 7:07 am EJ

I am not so critical of movies, in fact i would like to critique your critical critic ass. by being so critical as to rate movies by how shitty they are you tend to strangle all the life out of it. sure its not the best action flick, but i have to disagree with your opinion about the lack of realism. many techniques he used in the shooting scenes were very realistic. the only times i was left going ‘whhhaaaaaattttttt..’ was in the car chase shootout scene, and the epic drive over the couch through a hail of gunfire. everythings else was pretty legit. as for the acting Liam wasnt really going for the over the top badass role, he is playing a father with an extensive service career who has 80 hours to get his only child back… daughters acting wasnt too bad, all in all it was a very entertaining movie worth a few viewings.

To all the naive women who think american girls arent kidnapped and sold like any other female, go to another country and start telling everyone your alone whilst advertising your immaturity. for the record im not at fault, becuase this is retarded advice.

January 15, 2010 @ 11:14 am Dawn

I’m soooo glad that I didn’t read just your review before I saw this movie. I might have missed a very good movie. Yes a lot of the shoot outs weren’t very realistic but it is a movie and as I tell my 8 year old son….. Most of what you see on tv and movies is not real. If movies/shows were made 100% in reality, we wouldn’t watch them as they wouldn’t keep our attention. It’s the shock and awe that we like. The movie definitely opened my eyes to what goes on. I had known about human trafficing but didn’t really know. I always wondered why people didn’t run if the chance came, I had no idea that they kept them drugged like that. I think about when I was younger(I’m almost 39) and feel very lucky. I put myself in so many situations that something like this could have happened to me. If I had a daughter, I would make her watch this movie every year of her life from age 12 on. These days we can’t be too careful with our children, it’s sad that we can’t let our children have the freedom that we had as children/teens but sadly in todays world, we just can’t. Anyway, WONDERFUL movie, in my opinion and reading most of the replies, over 80%, I’d say disagree with the original review of this movie.

January 15, 2010 @ 11:32 am Dawn

Oh, I forgot to add, I agree with a lot here, I too didn’t like the ending. The ending that they did was unesssesary. I think that they should have ended at the part where he got his daughter back and she said, “You came for me.”(or something like that) and he said, “I said I would.” That would have been the perfect ending for this movie. Anybody else agree that the movie should have been ended there or have a better ending?

April 22, 2010 @ 9:38 am Lul

yeah, I think the ending was just really unsensitive, if he is a hero, killing all the bad guys to save his daughter then he should be the one getting a fucking red carpet…right! –maybe the director tried to portray that he/the hero stays alone as he was,… or what!?? : good guys reward for being a “bad guy killing karate chop machine” is that he gets to have his own CAB.

By the way, movie was good. It just shows what a parent would do..not neccesarily could, but definetly would.

May 4, 2010 @ 11:21 am Stephanie

I believe the review was pretty accurate. It was a review of the movie, not on the values or lessons within the movie. However, the lessons within the movie are valuable. I have seen the movie several times, simply because it does not put me to sleep, and it can be entertaining.

Thank you for the review. Stephanie

July 29, 2010 @ 10:39 pm zac

This movie was not to horrible, but not to good either

July 15, 2011 @ 4:33 pm Moodle

Ok guys,we all know liam nelson is one of the best actors ever,this one and the shildren list is very good,also the unknown that he dont know who is,great,my favorite with de niro.

June 3, 2012 @ 10:19 pm Kirk

Thank you for such a well-written attention-grabbing article. I found it to be a very entertaining read.

Privacy Policy | About Us

 |  Log in

Screen Rant

Taken review.

While parts of it are a stretch, overall Liam Neeson makes Taken an extremely satisfying action flick.

Screen Rant reviews Taken

My opinion of Taken may be skewed - I have a daughter. So a movie that shows a father's daughter being kidnapped and the father going after the perpetrators with a vengeance most definitely speaks to me. :-)

Another factor in favor of the film is casting an older actor as a kick ass action hero: Liam Neeson. Of course the flip side is that having a 56 year old "regular guy" kicking major amounts of butt does strain credulity just a bit.

Taken opens with Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) in the living room of a modest home. He's alone and seems lonely. It turns out that he is divorced and is trying to make up for lost time with his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). His ex-wife Lenore (a very stiff Famke Janssen) has married a rich man, and Bryan is having a hard time competing with that, even though his Kim obviously loves him.

Kim wants to go on a trip to France with a friend, but being ex-CIA and familiar with the dangers that are out there doesn't want her to go. His ex-wife bullies him and his daughter's disappointment finally convinces him to reluctantly let her go, but with a bunch of rules for calling him and checking in often.

Of course he turns out to be right and she and her friend are kidnapped rather soon after their arrival in Paris. Kim calls her dad while terrified as she sees her friend being manhandled, knowing that she is next. Bryan immediately goes into "CIA mode" during the call and when one of the kidnappers gets on the phone Bryan tells him that he has kidnapped the wrong person in no uncertain terms.

He heads off to Paris alone to track down the kidnappers and save his daughter, and that's where the fun really begins. Despite the heavy tone of the film and what is at stake, it's great watching Neeson as he follows the breadcrumbs, taking twists and turns (some of which are VERY unexpected) in tracking down his daughter's whereabouts.

Surprisingly, Taken is rated PG-13. They manage this with the old "no blood visible" trick, but from the amount of violence and the subject matter (teen girls being kidnapped for sale into prostitution and addicted to serious drugs) I certainly think this should have been rated R.

Neeson is calm, cool and he kicks all kinds of bad guy butt. I enjoyed the film so much I could easily sit through it again, but it did have its flaws. Why did his CIA buddies not offer to go along and help? Some of the action scenes are a bit unbelievable considering how outnumbered Neeson is and the fact that they don't present him as an uber-buff Stallone character. The number of dots he connects within a short span of time is also hard to swallow. And one of the people he kills at the end of the film with no repercussions is a bit hard to swallow.

But enough with the nit-picking: Taken was a rocking good time, especially during this January/February time of year when there isn't much worth seeing at the movies.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Challengers Link to Challengers
• Abigail Link to Abigail
• Arcadian Link to Arcadian

New TV Tonight

• The Jinx: Season 2
• Knuckles: Season 1
• THEM: The Scare: Season 2
• Velma: Season 2
• The Big Door Prize: Season 2
• Secrets of the Octopus: Season 1
• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story: Season 1
• We're Here: Season 4

Most Popular TV on RT

• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• The Sympathizer: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Season 1
• Sugar: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• Parasyte: The Grey: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Under the Bridge Link to Under the Bridge
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

The Best TV Seasons Certified Fresh at 100%

Best TV Shows of 2024: Best New Series to Watch Now

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Weekend Box Office Results: Civil War Earns Second Victory in a Row

Deadpool & Wolverine : Release Date, Trailer, Cast & More

• Trending on RT
• Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
• Play Movie Trivia

Where to Watch

Watch Taken 2 with a subscription on Netflix, Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Taken 2 is largely bereft of the kinetic thrills -- and surprises -- that made the original a hit.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Olivier Megaton

Liam Neeson

Bryan Mills

Maggie Grace

Famke Janssen

Rade Serbedzija

Murad Krasniqi

Leland Orser

Best Movies to Stream at Home

Movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

Find Family Movies, Movie Ratings and Movie Reviews

Taken Parent Guide

If you can put the troubling theme aside, and approach this as an action movie, you'll see a lot of jason bourne in liam neeson's character..

What would you do to save your daughter? Former spy Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is willing to do anything, even dust off his retired skills and shake-up old contacts after his teen-aged daughter (Maggie Grace) is Taken by a ruthless gang and sold into the sex-trade.

Release date January 30, 2009

Run Time: 89 minutes

Official Movie Site

Get Content Details

The guide to our grades, parent movie review by rod gustafson.

Here’s a movie that will help any overly possessive father feel vindicated about their desire to know what their daughter is up to at any given moment. When 17-year-old Kim (Maggie Grace) reveals to her estranged father Bryan (Liam Neeson) that she wants to travel to Paris with her 19-year-old friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy), Dad’s reaction is anything but encouraging. Part of the problem is he’s a retired CIA agent and consequently well aware of the risks two blithe young girls may face in a foreign country.

Sadly, his fears are proven correct just minutes after the duo lands and meet the handsome Peter (Nicolas Giraud) who talks them into sharing a taxi. What they don’t know is their newfound friend works for a criminal network. Shortly after they are dropped off at the apartment where they are planning to stay, a gang barges in and abducts both teens. On the phone to her father when the attackers arrive, Kim’s final screams, along with an abductor’s threatening words, provide the only clues Bryan has to find his daughter. Hopping a jet to France, he immediately sets out to rescue his girl, regardless of who or what may stand in his way.

Other topics parents will face is the sex trade and portrayal of young women who have been lured or forced into a drug dependency to keep them in a semi-conscious state so their services may be sold to willing customers. This film doesn’t include overt nudity or sexual activity, but scenes do depict young women in minimal dress, some of whom are seen with men. Discussions surrounding these issues are included, along with some moderate and mild profanities.

If you can put the troubling theme aside, and approach this as an action movie, you’ll see a lot of Jason Bourne in Liam Neeson’s character. Unstoppable, he is able to demonstrate skills that range from high-speed driving against the flow of a one-way street to nursing a drug overdosed patient back to life with a selection of medications. This guy doesn’t leave us thinking for a moment that he won’t reach his goal and provide us with the foregone conclusion. He’s not quite James Bond, but he will certainly never be taken or stirred.

About author

Rod Gustafson

Taken rating & content info.

Why is Taken rated PG-13? Taken is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for intense sequences of violence, disturbing thematic material, sexual content, some drug references and language.

This film about a father trying to rescue his daughter from the European sex trade features discussions about that topic, along with many scenes of aggressive violence. The protagonist is able to kill with his hands and confronts a variety of enemies that he strangles, stabs, bludgeons, shoots or tortures (one extended scene shows a man tied to a chair through which electricity is applied). Most of the violence is bloodless, however this is a film about vengeance and no regard is given to asking questions before enacting vigilante force. Women are seen, some of them partially clad and drugged, in a prostitution operation. A young woman states her desire of wanting a man to sleep with her. Language includes some mild and moderate profanities, along with scatological expletives and terms of deity. Social drinking is portrayed. Addictive drugs are used to subdue women.

Page last updated July 25, 2016

Taken Parents' Guide

This movie contains characters of various ethnicities. What roles do the French play? The Albanians? The Arabs? How do these compare to the American characters?

What techniques do the screenwriters use to justify Bryan’s violence? Why can he not turn to the police for help? How is the perceived time constraint (he is told he probably only has 96 hours to find his daughter) used to motivate his actions?

The most recent home video release of Taken movie is May 12, 2009. Here are some details…

Home Video Notes: Taken

Release Date: 12 May 2009

Taken releases to DVD in widescreen, with audio tracks in Dolby Digital 5.1 (English) and Dolby Digital Surround (French and Spanish). Subtitles are available in English, French and Spanish.

There is also a Blu-ray edition of Taken. Presented in widescreen, the disc offers audio tracks in DTS HD Master Audio (English) and Dolby Digital 5.1 (French and Spanish), with subtitles in English, French and Spanish.

Both the DVD and Blu-ray versions of Taken provide the following bonus materials:

- Featurettes: Black OPS Field Manual, Le Making Of, Avant Premiere and Inside Action ( 6 Side by Side Comparisons ).

- Audio Commentary: Director Pierre Morel, Cinematographer Michel Abramowicz and Michel Julienne and Writer Robert Mark Kamen.

- Trailers: Wolverine, Street Fighter, 12 Rounds, Notorious and Possession .

- Digital Copy of Taken.

Related home video titles:

Flightplan features Jody Foster as a desperate mother who has lost her child on a large airplane. Brokedown Palace tells the story of two young girls who unwittingly become drug “mules” in a foreign country.

Related news about Taken

Top 10 Movies That Dared Open on Super Bowl Weekend

{parents:pull_quote}

"Protecting the Innocent from the Merciless"

What You Need To Know:

(BB, C, LLL, VVV, S, A, DD, MM) Strong moral worldview with moral, redemptive premise with Christian values, marred by the hero’s occasional cold brutality; 16 obscenities (including three “f” words), two strong profanities and 10 light profanities; very strong, sometimes brutal violence includes pointblank shooting, man hit by speeding truck, fighting, man chops throats of some henchmen with his hand to kill them, villain tortured with electric shocks, gun battles, vehicle chase scene, female teenagers kidnapped and imprisoned; implied forced prostitution and sex trafficking; no nudity; alcohol use; smoking and gangsters drug girls in sex trafficking trade; and, lying, kidnapping, tattoos, police corruption.

More Detail:

TAKEN is a straight-ahead action thriller about a retired spy who has to use his skills to save his daughter from some scuzzy white slave traders in Paris.

Liam Neeson stars as Bryan Mills, who has retired from the spy business to be closer to his 17-year-old daughter, Kim, now living with his ex-wife and her new husband in Southern California. Bryan reluctantly agrees to let his underage daughter go to Paris with her girlfriend, Amanda, even though Kim and her mother lied to Bryan about Amy and Amanda traveling around Europe following the band U2’s new tour.

Of course, the first day they arrive in Paris, Kim and Amanda meet Peter, who is actually working for white slave traders from Albania. Peter’s evil friends kidnap Amy and Amanda, and Bryan records the kidnapping through Amy’s cell phone.

“I will look for you, I will find you. And I will kill you,” he tells the head kidnapper who picks up Kim’s phone. “Good luck,” the kidnapper tersely replied.

Bryan hops a plane to Paris and begins looking for his daughter. He finds Peter, but a speeding truck accidentally kills Peter while he’s running away. So, Bryan starts looking for Kim in a couple places. Can he find her before the Albanians sell her off to the highest bidder?

TAKEN is a rousing, but violent, chase thriller. Though estranged from his daughter and his ex-wife, Bryan is shown from the beginning to be a caring father trying to make up for all the times his job as a spy took him out of the country. While in Europe searching for his daughter, however, Bryan shows the rough aspects of his character. A couple times he is a bit too cold and brutal, showing no mercy to the merciless villains who took his daughter and her friend. This morally problematic content makes his character seem a little less heroic and, coupled with the movie’s foul language, merits extreme caution. Even so, this is an engaging thriller with a somewhat sympathetic hero who does all he can to save his victimized daughter.

Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.

What you listen to, watch, and read has power. Movieguide® wants to give you the resources to empower the good and the beautiful. But we can’t do it alone. We need your support.

You can make a difference with as little as $7. It takes only a moment. If you can, consider supporting our ministry with a monthly gift. Thank you.

Movieguide® is a 501c3 and all donations are tax deductible.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Consider This from NPR

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

Is this fictitious civil war closer to reality than we think?

You're reading the Consider This newsletter, which unpacks one major news story each day. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to more from the Consider This podcast .

(L-R) Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny Murray Close/A24 hide caption

(L-R) Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny

1. A civil war for the silver screen

Civil War, the new A24 film from British director Alex Garland, imagines a scenario that might not seem so far-fetched to some; a contemporary civil war breaking out in the United States.

In this world, the U.S. has split into various factions. The president, played by Nick Offerman – has given himself a third term, and he's hoping to fend off an assault from one of the more powerful groups.

In what might seem like the most unbelievable narrative twist, California and Texas form an alliance to become the "Western Forces" and fight against Offerman's regime. Sure, I guess!

Some independent candidates start their own political parties to ease ballot access

2. how far are we from reality.

NPR movie critic Bob Mondello says the movie doesn't do a lot of explaining to help us understand how the U.S. got to this moment. But he says that makes it stronger.

"What became much more interesting in the moment was what it looks like to transpose things that we've always associated with other countries – the bombed out helicopters and things like that – to place that in a J.C. Penney parking lot."

And while the film has taken heat for little mention of politics, the question of an actual civil war has everything to do with it.

Polling has shown a significant minority thinks a civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next 10 years. So what do the experts say?

Movie Reviews

'civil war' is a doomsday thought experiment — that could have used more thinking, 3. division in the u.s..

Amy Cooter is a director of research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Her work has led her to the question that Garland's movie has put in the minds of both moviegoers and political pundits: Could a second civil war really happen here?

Cooter wants to make one thing clear: "I don't think that civil war is imminent, but I think there are some people who wish we would have one, and wish that they could be effectively culture soldiers to re-enact a civil order that they see as better for them and their families."

In her studies of militias and political extremists, Cooter has observed a movement of groups similar to those who joined in on the January 6th riots who feel disconnected from the current political moment, or perhaps want to return to a previous version of society, that they feel served them better.

And while Cooter doesn't think a civil war will be happening anytime soon, she does say this:

"I think we are at a moment of extreme political division that may get worse before it gets better."

This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods, Jonaki Mehta and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

• far-right extremism
• political divide

Cookie banner

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy . Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use , which became effective December 20, 2019.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.

Follow The Ringer online:

• Follow The Ringer on Twitter
• Follow The Ringer on Instagram
• Follow The Ringer on Youtube

Site search

• What to Watch
• Bill Simmons Podcast
• 24 Question Party People
• 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s
• Against All Odds
• Bachelor Party
• The Bakari Sellers Podcast
• Beyond the Arc
• The Big Picture
• Black Girl Songbook
• Book of Basketball 2.0
• Boom/Bust: HQ Trivia
• Counter Pressed
• The Dave Chang Show
• East Coast Bias
• Every Single Album: Taylor Swift
• Extra Point Taken
• Fairway Rollin’
• Fantasy Football Show
• The Fozcast
• The Full Go
• Gambling Show
• Gene and Roger
• Higher Learning
• The Hottest Take
• Jam Session
• Just Like Us
• Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air
• Last Song Standing
• The Local Angle
• Masked Man Show
• The Mismatch
• Mint Edition
• Morally Corrupt Bravo Show
• New York, New York
• Off the Pike
• One Shining Podcast
• Philly Special
• Plain English
• The Pod Has Spoken
• The Press Box
• The Prestige TV Podcast
• Recipe Club
• The Rewatchables
• Ringer Dish
• The Ringer-Verse
• The Ripple Effect
• The Rugby Pod
• The Ryen Russillo Podcast
• Sports Cards Nonsense
• Slow News Day
• Speidi’s 16th Minute
• Somebody’s Gotta Win
• Sports Card Nonsense
• This Blew Up
• Trial by Content
• Wednesday Worldwide
• What If? The Len Bias Story
• Wrighty’s House
• Wrestling Show
• Latest Episodes
• All Podcasts

Filed under:

• Pop Culture

War Is Hell, Ain’t It?

For a movie that set off a firestorm with its trailer, Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ is surprisingly bereft of any major commentary—choosing instead to merely drop the viewer into a war zone and see what happens

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: War Is Hell, Ain’t It?

“What’s so civil about war, anyway?” asked Axl Rose back in 1990, when he and his band had the world’s ear. Nobody would accuse Guns N’ Roses of being a political act like, say, U2, but releasing a single that paid homage to Martin Luther King Jr. while critiquing America’s misadventures in Vietnam was a risky move, especially considering the core demographics of their fan base. For extra pop-cultural cred, “Civil War” sampled the villainous prison warden played by Strother Martin in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke , whose ominously drawled warning of “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” became a sort of sinister catchphrase —a euphemism suggesting progressive rhetoric wrapped around authoritarian brutality like barbed wire. It’s less that Martin’s character is worried about being understood than that he doesn’t want his charges to talk back.

Alex Garland’s Civil War is a movie with a failure to communicate, though not for lack of trying; its maker understands the visual and rhetorical language of agitprop, but he has such a limited vocabulary as a dramatist—and such a narrow agenda as a provocateur—that it doesn’t matter. There is a significant difference between movies that are polarizing because they ask difficult questions and ones that are simply designed to be divisive, and Civil War belongs decisively in the second category. Not only does the film’s depiction of a near-future America smoldering in the wreckage of its own colliding kamikaze ideologies feel borrowed from a number of other sources, but it also rings hollow, precisely because its vision of violent social collapse is so derivative. In attempting to make a movie largely about the ethical dimension of image making—a dilemma experienced by a group of war correspondents wandering through a country that’s become its own private twilight zone—Garland succeeds mostly in exposing his own limitations. He’s a pulp merchant, a purveyor of high-toned exploitation trying his best to strip-mine an anxious election-year zeitgeist while there’s still time.

The Ringer ’s Streaming Guide

There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.

Officially, Civil War is an original screenplay, just like 2014’s Ex Machina , the wryly funny, sexily technophobic Bluebeard riff that positioned him as, if not the new Stanley Kubrick, then at least a worthy pretender. Like a lot of successful genre filmmakers—including his countryman Christopher Nolan—Garland is an inveterate magpie, subsuming aesthetic and conceptual material from a range of sources into his own vision. And whatever one thinks of films like Annihilation or Men , they are movies with a vision—carefully engineered acts of world-building suffused with atmosphere and punctuated by striking, unsettling moments. Which is why it’s all the stranger that right from the very beginning the storytelling language of Civil War feels so totally borrowed, including a pair of brazen allusions tilting toward copycatting more than homage. The first is a prologue nodding to the opening of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in which the president of the United States (Nick Offerman) nervously rehearses a none-too-convincing victory speech from behind barricaded doors; the more he talks about his government’s impending triumph over insurgent forces—specifically, a coalition led by the state governments of Florida and Texas—the more he looks and sounds like a cornered rat. The second reference is even more on the nose: At a rally in downtown New York City, a suicide bomber clad in an American flag ignites a booby-trapped backpack, resulting in carnage whose gory imagery and stylized, ear-ringing sound design are indebted to Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men .

It’s worth noting that Fahrenheit 9/11 and Children of Men are keynote works of what could be called post-9/11 cinema— an early-millennial period when both serious and satirical American filmmakers were aligned in trying to criticize (or, in Moore’s case, outright topple) the Dubya White House. With his smug frat-boy countenance and aides who dated back to Nixon, Bush II was the poster boy for “America: Fuck yeah” and a perfect symbolic scapegoat for filmmakers running the gamut from Gus Van Sant to Sacha Baron Cohen. Two decades later, Hollywood obviously still leans mostly to the left, but the terms of engagement have changed. One thing that Barack Obama and Donald Trump had in common was that while their presidencies were both lightning rods for extremist criticism, they didn’t yield much in the way of memorable or great cinema. The closest thing to a cogent popular political allegory in that period was the ever-reliable Purge franchise, which imagined a silent, seething majority perpetually counting down the hours until a preordained, murderous, insurrectionist return of the repressed.

There’s a potentially great, cathartic dark comedy to be made about the psychology of an event like the Capitol attack of January 6, or about the dangers of unchecked autocracy manifesting as common-sense, anti-woke populism (among his myriad outrageous policy moves, Offerman’s commander in chief apparently opted to gift himself with a third term). Garland, though, is not the guy to thread that particular needle: Where a director like Jordan Peele is able to channel seriousness through sketch-comedy absurdism (including Get Out ’s earlier and superior three-term president joke), Garland doubles down on the idea that he’s doing important work. The strain is palpable. In interviews, the director has explained that Civil War was originally written before January 6 but that the shadow of the insurrection still fell over the production; talking to Dazed , he admitted that he could “detect [it] around the set” and that the bad vibes gave the production “a greater sense of anger.” It’s an interesting observation insofar as the finished film doesn’t so much seethe with rage as ooze a kind of cynical resignation—the sort that comes when a filmmaker either considers himself to be above his subject matter or isn’t being honest about his relationship to the material.

There’s certainly some kind of irony in a guy whose best work—2012’s Dredd , which Garland cowrote and produced with director Pete Travis—is an (exhilarating) exercise in hyperbolic carnage suddenly producing a sanctimonious statement against violence, but otherwise, Civil War doesn’t seem to come from a particularly personal place. Garland’s fascination with female protagonists over the years is laudable, but, as in Annihilation and Men , he can seem to conceive women only in terms of lack: The main character here is a veteran shutterbug named Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) who’s grown so inured to the sight of death and decay—and her role in sharing it with an increasingly information-starved public—that she’s basically a zombie. If that’s not enough of a cliché, she’s been given a younger kindred spirit as a combination apprentice and surrogate daughter: Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a 20-ish wannabe war correspondent whose lack of worldliness is her defining characteristic. Jessie isn’t a character, but a device; her job will be to carry the torch for journalistic integrity after her mentor (inevitably) meets her demise in the line of duty.

Lest that last bit seem like a spoiler, Civil War is the sort of movie in which hard-edged professionals grimly sit around prophesying their own fates. And although Lee’s arc is predictable, the flatness of the role is no fault of Dunst’s; like Jessie Buckley in Men , the actress inhabits Garland’s barren idea of dramaturgy so fully that she occasionally draws us all the way in with her. Spaeny, meanwhile, is livelier than she was as an anesthetized princess in Priscilla , yet Jessie isn’t much more than a cipher—a device through which we witness a series of showdowns between characters of different allegiances or tableaux testifying to the sheer photogenic brokenness of the social contract. In structural terms, Civil War is a road movie, with Lee and Jessie traveling from New York to Washington in the company of two other members of the fifth estate: a hard-drinking (and, it’s implied, possibly sexually predatory) reporter, Joel (Wagner Moura), and an ex-op-ed specialist, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), both of whom have inside information on the embattled president’s location and hopes of scoring a final interview before he’s toppled once and for all.

Civil War has been set up so that each successive rest stop bristles with a different kind of anxiety. Stopping for gas means encountering a garage’s worth of bloody strung-up dissidents, displayed like trophies for rubberneckers. Despite traveling with the word “press” emblazoned on their van and flak jackets, Lee and her merry band aren’t insulated from the surrounding dangers, and on a few occasions, they even go looking for trouble: A firefight in an abandoned apartment complex eventually finds Jessie growing into her point-and-click instincts. (The juxtaposition of different kinds of “shooting” in this movie is relentless, a pale imitation of motifs developed in Full Metal Jacket , which, like all of Kubrick’s provocations, understood the relationship between savagery and satire.)

A couple of the set pieces are effective, like an idyll in a Lynchian small town whose smiling inhabitants seem oblivious to the larger conflict (the punchline is Garland’s best and shiveriest sight gag), or a pitched battle between snipers whose worldview no longer extends beyond their own scopes. But there are also risible bits, like a nighttime drive through a forest fire where the floating, burning embers are meant as signifiers of some terrible, fatalistic beauty—a scene that, however well shot, practically vibrates with banality. And then there’s the bit featuring a wandering platoon of disillusioned, trigger-happy soldiers—a device Garland used as far back as 28 Days Later —led by a deadpan Jesse Plemons, clad in red heart-shaped shades that mock the idea of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. “What kind of Americans are you?” he asks our heroes, who, having found themselves on the wrong end of the barrel, don’t know how to answer.

The failure to communicate is ominous, but the question (and its consequences) might be even scarier if we knew what kind of America Civil War took place in. Last month at South by Southwest, Garland got in some trouble when he said that “left and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state” and that he didn’t consider either to be “good or bad.” The statement may have been twisted in bad faith by the media (another irony considering the film’s faith in journalists as truth tellers), but at a minimum, it still suggests a filmmaker who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty with such crass things as sociopolitical specifics.

It may be that trying to fill in the blanks of how the sort of scenario depicted in Civil War could come to pass is a fool’s errand—an invitation to criticism that would weaken an already rickety conceptual infrastructure. (Exhibit A: a fleeting mention of “The Antifa Massacre,” which sounds more like a band name than a possible flashpoint.) But would it really be worse than using America’s current political strife as a coy structuring absence? Would it be worse than Garland acting as if such avoidance makes him the adult in the room? The ostensibly outrageous climax, meanwhile, features sequences of urban warfare meant to drop jaws, but these scenes point in such an obvious direction that the suspense is flattened while the audience is simply flattered into acquiescence. There are a number of genuinely profound movies whose thesis boils down to “war is hell,” several less expensive or pretentious than Civil War , but typically they arrive there honestly, and only after challenging their audience. Civil War , which is somehow simultaneously pedantic and frictionless, feels weirdly like a movie of the moment that won’t last—a victory lap around an observation that was already made by Axl Rose.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

Next Up In Movies

‘hardcore’ with bill simmons, chris ryan, and sean fennessey.

• Netflix’s Backtrack on Transparency
• Underrated/Overrated: ’90s Edition, Book Tours, and How to Menu: Kopitiam With Rachel Khong
• Coachella Thoughts, Alleged Taylor Swift Album Leak, and More!
• The 10 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2024. Plus: Tarantino’s Pivot, Scorsese’s Sinatra, and Spielberg’s UFOs.
• Taylor Swift’s Questionable Return to TikTok

Sign up for the The Ringer Newsletter

Thanks for signing up.

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

‘Shogun’ Delivers a Satisfying Conclusion With an Understated Finale

In the finale of ‘Shogun,’ "A Dream of a Dream," FX’s acclaimed series ends as it began: highlighting character over spectacle

Hoping to Draft the Next Puka Nacua? Look No Further Than These Six Late-Round Prospects

Finding a Day 3 prospect as immediately productive as last season’s breakout rookie sensation might sound impossible, but don’t sleep on these prospects who could be a steal in the 2024 draft.

KNICKS UP 2-0 AFTER THRILLER

New York survives a big game from Philly’s Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey

Bill, Chris, and Sean take it back to ’79

Alex Cora on the Red Sox’s Start to the Season

The manager talks about how the team has managed to win despite a raft of injuries

Catching Up With Tyler Cameron and ‘Love Island’ (U.K.) Season 2, Episodes 13-19

TV personality Tyler Cameron joins the pod to discuss his new show. Then Callie stops by to talk all things ‘Love Island’ (U.K.) Season 2.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, a bad day only gets worse.

Now streaming on:

Well, you can't fault the actors. That must mean it's the fault of the writer and director. "Take" is a monotonous slog through dirgeland, telling a story that seems strung out beyond all reason, with flashbacks upon flashbacks delaying interminably the underwhelming climax.

Minnie Driver and Jeremy Renner star, and both of their performances would distinguish a better screenplay. She is Ana, a house cleaner, the wife of an elementary schoolteacher and the mother of a hyperactive little boy named Jesse ( Bobby Coleman ). Renner plays Saul, a loser at a very low level, who owes $2,000 to a low-life and works for a storage company. He gets fired by stealing possessions from one locker and planting them in a locker where the contents will be auctioned. He pockets the extra cash. Neat, right? I don't know how the boss finds out about it. Just Saul's rotten luck.

It's one of those days. After getting fired, he splits his knuckles while breaking the window of his car, which won't start. Then he begs a pal for the $2,000, and is lent a car and assigned to steal a Range Rover. Then the owner of the Range Rover beats him to a pulp. He finds a gun in the loaner car, slips it in his pocket and goes to a drugstore to get his ailing dad's prescription filled. Seeing the cashier's window, he decides on the spot to rob the store, and in the process, shoots the cashier and takes little Jesse as hostage. If only he hadn't been fired, a lot of people would have been saved a lot of trouble.

These events are doled out parsimoniously by Charles Oliver , who wrote and directed, intercutting with Ana driving her own broken-down car and towing a trailer. She is driving to the prison where Saul is scheduled to be executed, and wants to talk to him before he dies. Although there is an enigmatic phone call over the opening credits that may explain this, I am not at all sure how by this point she seems to have misplaced her husband.

Meanwhile (the whole movie takes place meanwhile), we see Saul sitting chained to a chair, being walked down corridors, being prepared for death and then having a long theological chat with the prison chaplain. The chaplain is certainly a good sport, trying to convince the murderer that everything is part of God's plan. Saul is not too bright, but he cannot quite see how what he has done and what is being done to him represents good planning.

Ana and Saul do indeed meet and talk, but if you're hoping for a conversation along the lines of " Dead Man Walking ," you'll be disappointed. I spent more time wondering how long it takes to try and execute a prisoner in whatever state this is, since Saul still has a not-quite healed scar from the Range Rover beating, and a Band-Aid from the window-smashing.

One critic of the movie accuses it of having a sneaky ending that suggests it might all have been a dream. I guess that would explain the emphasis placed on closeups showing Ana and Saul staring at each other's ID patches on their uniforms. Maybe they imagined each other's lives? But then why would they meet?

The back-seat shot that may have misled the critic is obviously only in Ana's imagination. Little Jesse can't really be there. After all that's happened, do you think she would walk off and leave her son unattended in a prison parking lot?

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Now playing

The First Omen

Tomris laffly.

Late Night with the Devil

Matt zoller seitz.

Irena's Vow

Christy lemire.

Girls State

We Were the Lucky Ones

Robert daniels.

Glenn Kenny

Film credits.

Take (2008)

Rated R for some violent and disturbing content

Minnie Driver as Ana

Jeremy Renner as Saul

Bobby Coleman as Jesse

Adam Rodriguez as Steven

David Denman as Marty

Written and directed by

• Charles Oliver

Latest blog posts

Sonic the Hedgehog Franchise Moves to Streaming with Entertaining Knuckles

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Highlights Unearthed Treasures of Film History

Ebertfest Film Festival Over the Years

The 2024 Chicago Palestine Film Festival Highlights

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her. When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her. When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her.

• Josh Margolin
• June Squibb
• Fred Hechinger
• Richard Roundtree
• 4 User reviews
• 39 Critic reviews
• 76 Metascore

• Woman at Post Office

• Detective Morgan

• Gloria ('Annie')

• Theater Director

• Starey Gary

• Woman at Gas Station

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia June Squibb 's first starring film role in her decades-spanning career.
• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: The BEST and Weirdest Movies you (mostly) Haven't Seen Yet | Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

User reviews 4

• armando-fumagalli
• Jan 24, 2024
• How long will Thelma be? Powered by Alexa
• June 21, 2024 (United States)
• Switzerland
• United States
• Invention Studios
• Zurich Avenue
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 37 minutes

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed

Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 X (Twitter) Review: Dibakar Banerjee’s Latest Movie Gets Rave Reviews

By Devanshi Basu

Dibakar Banerjee’s highly-anticipated sequel, Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (LSD 2), has hit the screens after a 14-year hiatus from its predecessor. Teaming up once again with producer Ekta Kapoor, the filmmaker brings up a bold exploration of love and sex against the backdrop of the internet age. Released in theaters on April 19, 2024, the movie has sparked a flurry of reactions on social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

‘Satisfying and maddening’: Netizens on Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2

Much like its predecessor, the film showcases Banerjee’s signature unconventional storytelling. It blends three different storylines that delve deep into the intricacies of modern relationships against the backdrop of internet culture.

As early viewers took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to share their thoughts, opinions on Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 were as diverse as the stories it portrays. While some lauded the film for its boldness and innovation, others found it lacking in storytelling.

One Twitter user eagerly expressed , “I can’t WAIT to share my LSD 2 review with y’all tomorrow. Wild film, equal parts satisfying and maddening. Dibakar Banerjee is undoubtedly one of the strongest filmmakers of our times.”

Another user’s tweet encapsulated the film’s essence, “SHOOK. I don’t remember the last time I liked all the segments of an anthology film. I was ready to be disappointed, but #LSD2 is a Funny, dark, and bizarre film. It can never make money in theatres even in next 20 years. It should be on OTT. But what a film!” 

However, amidst the praise, there were voices of criticism. A user bluntly stated , “#LSD2 isn’t a film, it’s a joke. It’s so bad that no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to sit through the whole thing. #LoveSexAurDhokha2 miserably failed to deliver an engaging storyline, resulting in a disappointing viewing experience.” 

Overall, LSD 2 has emerged as a one-of-a-kind movie. The film is currently playing in nearby theaters.

When not obsessively writing about anything and everything related to cinema, you can catch her documenting nooks and crannies of Delhi.

Share article

Ava & Gabriel: A Love Story Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via Amazon Prime Video

Hansel and Gretel Limited Edition Blu-ray Out Now for 80s Family Fairytale Adventure

Godzilla x Kong’s Box Office Demolishes Godzilla vs. Kong’s Global Total

Marvel and dc.

Creature Commandos Update Given by James Gunn for First DCU Show

New X-Men Movie’s Story Synopsis Reportedly Revealed

Rumor: Avengers 5’s Release Date Might Not Be Delayed

LSD2: Love, Sex, Aur, Dhokha 2 Streaming Release Date Rumors

Do Aur Do Pyaar Vs. Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 Box Office Collection Day 3: Vidya Balan’s Movie Outperforms Debakar Banerjee’s Movie

Do Aur Do Pyaar X (Twitter) Review: Vidya Balan’s Latest Movie Receives Praise

Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (LSD 2) OTT Release Platform Revealed?