Taken

Taken starts with an uncanny similarity to Last Chance Harvey, which came out only a couple weeks ago. A divorced father is estranged from his daughter, and from his ex-wife, who has remarried a much wealthier and more socially-dynamic man, one who puts his own status and achievements to shame. He shows up rather awkwardly and unwelcome at a party for his daughter and seeks to mend the breach, only to realize how little he has to offer.

The narrative premise of the movie is thus one of male estrangement, and the story will center around the attempt of the estranged father to repair his relationship with his daughter, and to overcome his lingering feeling of being second-rate compared to his wife's new husband.

Whereas Dustin Hoffman's Harvey finds his path to redemption through new love, Liam Neeson's Bryan Mills, an ex-CIA agent, will find his by being a kick-ass agent of vengeance, shooting and killing his way through Paris to save his teenage daughter (and her precious virginity) from an Albanian white slavery ring.

It's quite an elaborate fantasy, and reminded me in no small way of Paul Blart: Mall Cop in the way it portrays the lengths that a man must go through in 2009 in order to win the respect and admiration of the ones he loves.

The movie is filled with plenty of entertaining action sequences, in a script by Luc Besson. Neeson is a bit wooden in delivery at times, but his tall lanky body makes for good fighting sequences compared to the shorter bad guys. The Jason Bourne part of the story was much more easy to watch than I expected.

But in 2009, there are no real heroes, only palatable antiheroes masquerading as heroes. In the degraded world of this movie, Neeson's character throws honor out the window at every possible moment, because honor is for fools who don't understand fatherly love.

He tortures with electricity, which works (of course) to get crucial information, as it always does in the fictional world of movies and t.v., and then executes his helpless prisoner even after he gets what he needs. He also executes unarmed bad guys, including ones begging for their lives. In this corrupt world, everyone is equally guilty and deserving of death, so justice equals pulling a trigger. No one can be spared. Even the cops are crooked, of course, an assumption that barely causes a stir in movies now.

We cheer for him at every turn, as he plugs another hole in the head of a begging baddie, because, well, they are evil and he is righteous. Who wouldn't do such things to save their virginal daughter? Who wouldn't cross every line possible?

This of course was exactly the point of classical heroism---there are lines that one must never cross, no matter what. Yet a hero could always still achieve the desired justice. Audiences now no longer accept this as realistic. We have been trained to believe that torture is always necessary, and since we are the righteous ones, it is always justifiable too.

And Neeson's character is very, very righteous in this movie. America may be degraded, but when it comes to protecting one's child, anything goes. Everything he does feels like a jolt of pleasant smack in your veins. Give us more!

My friend Thor summed it up best, with his description of the vengeance principle in movies these days: I'd kill 10 million people to save my baby!

The saddest thing about this movie is that none of the torture sequences and executions were necessary for the story---none. Exactly the same story could have been told with a hero who remained honorable at every turn, even to the point of bluffing in the use of torture (the old movie trick of heroes, before we threw in the towel and accepted "enhanced techniques"). It would have been a much, much better movie, because the story itself was well told, even as a fantasy of a father's redemption with his daughter.

That the movie-makers felt they had to use these techniques, and that audiences of 2009 have come to expect them, is yet another damning verdict on the wretched state of American society. Torture, you might be led to conclude, was the entire point of the movie.

Actually plot-wise it makes perfect sense that he must execute all the bad guys on the spot, as he meets them. This is due to the inherent corruption of the police as portrayed in the movie. The corrupted State cannot and will not arrest and imprison the bad guys, even if they are exposed, and thus if Neeson's character does not execute all the bad guys, the audience knows they will continue to take more girls in the future. This is perhaps the most damning verdict of the movie---we live in a world where justice is completely impossible.

But if you save your daughter from being raped by an Arab sheik, she will love you dearly, at least for a day.