Taken
Overview
"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want." You know the speech. Everybody knows the speech — it's probably the most quoted phone call in movie history. Liam Neeson was in his mid-fifties and known for prestige dramas when he picked up that phone as Bryan Mills, a retired CIA man whose daughter is snatched in Paris while he's listening on the line. What follows is barely ninety minutes long and contains almost nothing else: no subplots, no comic relief, no romance. Just a father with a very particular set of skills converting a city into a crime scene, one safehouse at a time. Director Pierre Morel shoots it lean and fast, the script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen strips the revenge thriller down to its frame, and Neeson plays the whole thing dead calm — which is exactly what makes him frightening. The trafficking plot gave it more grit than most action films bother with. It cost about 25 million dollars, made roughly ten times that, spawned two sequels and a hundred imitations, and completely rewired what an action hero could look like: grayer, older, and much, much more tired.
