Monday, Feb. 02, 2009

Story telling, action keeps 'Taken' moving

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

When I heard the new action-thriller Taken was PG-13 instead of the expected R, I immediately made the world's wittiest and most insightful prediction about how it was destined to suck.

No one was there to hear it, so you and the fine people at Guinness will just have to take my word on it. But PG-13 is usually death for action movies the way heaping teaspoons of poison are death for mortals. That rating is basically a huge sign saying "Caution: The following film is safe and predictable and everyone will turn out OK and the characters will make bad jokes at each other instead of swearing. In fact, you should probably just stay home, turn off the lights, and pass out during the second half of The Matrix just like you always do, you turboloser."

But it's hard to fit all that in that tiny ratings box, so it's handy to condense it into a short string of alphanumerics. Not that an R ratings is by any means a guarantee of quality; that just means when bad guys get shot, they may leak an opaque red fluid the real world knows as "blood." They do tend to have a much higher success rate than their wimpier teen-friendly cousins, though, making it all kinds of surprising that Taken is pretty great.

CIA operative Liam Neeson has retired to be closer to daughter Maggie Grace, who's all but grown up as he's been away on duty. When Grace's friend invites her to spend the summer unaccompanied in Paris, Neeson, under pressure from his ex-wife, relents and lets her go.

But within hours of landing, Grace and her friend are kidnapped by a gang intending to force them into prostitution. With scant details on the captors, Neeson jets to Paris unaccompanied, unauthorized, and with only a four-day window before his daughter disappears off the map completely.

"Safe" is not a word I'd apply to Taken, which dishes out violence, grit, and unexpectedly nasty plot developments without drawing any special attention to itself. Understatement in an action movie is about as common as a Seattle sports championship, so director Pierre Morel's Hollywood debut (he previously made the hilariously acrobatic French action film District 13) is a promising one. Along with its recent spade of horror movies, it looks like the little nation of France is finally making its first contribution to arts and culture.

Taken's quick, brutal action mirrors a plot that's heavy on the turns of Neeson's investigation. Kept brisk and coherent, his hunt maintains its momentum without ever feeling like a wild goose chase.

Credit writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen for much of that. These guys have written so many movies their IMDB pages are as thick as the Bible. Their output makes Nora Roberts look like J.D. Salinger. (What do you mean you've never heard of Nora Roberts? Don't we all work in bookstores and sigh with rage whenever we realize that if a pile of her complete works fell on us we'd be crushed into a grainy, pink ooze? Oh, forget the whole thing.)

Those two have written so much it's impossible to tell whether they're mercenary hacks or massively talented chameleons capable of writing anything, but they're on their game here. Their Violence Preamble, that first 20-30 minutes of an action or horror movie that introduces us to the characters who are about to be repeatedly traumatized right up to the credits, is compelling enough that Neeson's family drama had me forgetting there was also an hour of kidnapping and mayhem on the way.

Watching Taken is a weird experience: once that mayhem kicks in, there are moments when it feels like your average "good guy slaying bad guys on the path to valor" thing -- and then you realize the plot is booking along, people are dying you don't expect to be dying, and though Neeson is something of a hero, he's also acting way outside the law; all those people he's shooting and karate chopping, bad though they may be, are actually being murdered. As always, Morel doesn't make a big deal out of any of this. He just tells a story and tells it well.

Grade: B+