"I dont know who you are. I dont know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I dont 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, thatll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you dont, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you. On the surface, Taken has all the integrity of the sort of straight-to-DVD action flick you'd find in a petrol station bargain bin. And indeed, there's enough bad acting and terrible plotting inherent to this Luc Besson produced schlockfest to have even the most easily of pleased action fans frowning. And yet none of it matters, because as soon as Taken shifts into gear after an initially underwhelming opening act, it offers up some of the most relentlessly entertaining, visceral and downright bloody action in recent memory. The key to success here, of course, is Liam Neeson, who plays former CIA operative Bryan Mills, a man who will stop at nothing - genuinely, he will stop at nothing - to get his daughter back from the clutches of an Albanian human trafficking ring. The violence here is hard-hitting and graphic - you feel every punch as Mills takes down a endless array of meatheads with zero remorse; truly, Neeson's stoic hero gives new meaning to the term "no f*cks given."
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
