Taken - and Liam Neeson's character, Bryan Mills - has come to define the "dadsploitation" genre - movies about aged fathers who will stop at nothing to protect their kids. But stop for a moment to question whether Mills really needed to act how he did. Mills' daughter, Kim, has only been captured when he begins his campaign of hell towards anybody or anyone who may or may not have spoken to her since she flew to Paris. She's not dead and hasn't been notably injured. And yet Mills is killing people the moment he steps off of the plane with little to no real picture of the situation at hand. To say that Mills acts irrationally... well, that's a bit of an understatement. As Mills continues after Kim across the span of the movie, his tolerance for human life lowers drastically - you'd think, by the way he acts, that Kim was already dead. He stops at nothing to exact "revenge" where full-on revenge isn't really necessary. This includes shooting an innocent woman (and the wife of a police officer) in the arm, just 'cause. By the time Mills catches up with Kim, he's murdered countless Albanian goons and ripped Paris to shreds. Kim is fine, by the way; shaken up, of course, but nothing all that bad has happened to her in the few days between her leaving home and arriving in Paris. And all those dead people - many of whom were probably just sad and desperate. The point is that a father will do anything for his daughter, but Mills verges on villainy.
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.
