Neeson thrills in 'Taken'

"Taken" — 3 out of 5 stars

Ty Hampton
Critic's Corner

With a commanding performance, intense fight scenes, and unrelenting cool in "Taken" — legendary actor Liam Neeson placed his best argument for why he in his 50's could steal Daniel Craig's job playing Mr. Bond in his sleep.

Bryan Mills (Neeson) is a retired CIA spy who picks up bodyguard jobs to make some extra cash as he tries to be a better father after years of life on the road abroad. When Mills' daughter is kidnapped by sex-slave traffickers on a trip to Paris, the retired agent dusts himself off and goes back to work with a 96-hour ticking clock before he knows she will be sold as a prostitute and never seen again.

As a master of espionage he needs no training for this job, except this time around he's on a no-holds-barred path of vengeance to reclaim what matters to him most, no matter what the cost.

We saw a bit of Neeson's action chops recently in "Batman Begins" and "Gangs of New York", but I was surprised that he as a great dramatic actor could also take on such a dominating action role as this. His CIA-like proficiency and candor were believable, but it was his dramatic rhythm that kept me on my seat for the bulk of this one. This man can flat out act, period.

The North Ireland-born lead-actor of "Taken" and 'Schindler's List' has a film career spanning three decades and seems to be kicking more fanny than ever at age 56. But the most shocking thing on this veteran actor's resume isn't filed under past jobs, rather future projects as Neeson is lined up to again work with Steven Spielberg playing Abraham Lincoln in the biopic scheduled for a 2011 release.

Although he was working with a predictable storyline solely focused on revenge, director Pierre Morel With "Taken" turning out a polished and professional big screen directoral debut, one only needs to look at his prior experience behind the camera as the cinematographer (or "director of photography") for Jason Statham action flicks "Transporter", "Transporter 2" and "War" with Jet Li.

The story is quite conventional, linear and predictable though. No twists, no turns — just the thrill of exacting seemingly justifiable revenge. The problem I have with this is you have an amazing lead actor and a story that could have been expanded to tap into some of his skills more but instead opted not to do so. What do we know about the other characters (good and bad) in this story? Nothing. What do we know about the protagonist Mills? Not much, but enough to know this guy has deep secrets and is very, very good at what he does.

So why not make this a more interesting story as a character study of a man who is a has-been badass, who's washed-up, and now dealing with this vengeance-fueled retrieval of his daughter with some degree of emotion or struggle — rather than enjoying it with such uncomplicated ease.This of course would spin the film back into more of a dramatic thriller genre field, ala "Gone Baby Gone" which is a far better film that seized all the right opportunities.

Instead "Taken" lingers as an entertaining, but slightly better than average, action/thriller. For this reason I give it 3 out of 5 stars for the genre, but I would recommend the movie to action fans who are weary on excessive content these days as this one keeps it in the PG-13 ballpark.

"Taken" is PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, thematic material, and drug references. This movie is showing at the Entertainer Cinema in Ronan at 4, 7, and 9:10 p.m. daily.