The American Spectator : Taken

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Taken

By James Bowman on 4.7.09 @ 6:02AM

Progressive reviewers and others older than 13 were aghast, but torture has its uses in this CIA superhero flick.

As I was perusing the website of the New Republic the other day, I came across this sub-headline to Christopher Orr's review of Monsters vs. Aliens: "Enjoyable enough if you're under 13, or have the taste of someone under 13." Ha ha. But wait a minute. Isn't there supposed to be some news value in a headline? Aren't you supposed to say "Man bites dog," not "Dog bites man," if you want people to read on? Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't know at least as well as Mr. Orr and long before stepping into the cinema to see it that Monsters vs. Aliens is going to be a movie made for the sensibility of a 13-year-old? We could go further and ask if there is anyone who doesn't know that 90 percent of Hollywood's mainstream product is made for 13-year-olds? The surprise, I guess, the unexpected element in his story, is that he should treat anything so predictable as a surprise.

Well, here's a real surprise. If you have come to think, as I have, that the CIA is just a dysfunctional agency in the business of producing useless intelligence, getting things wrong, offering sinecures to the likes of Valerie Plame and engaging in bureaucratic backbiting and the undermining of elected authority, it turns out not to be true. Not according to Hollywood, anyway. All true patriots will rejoice to learn from Taken that the Agency, or the Company, as those of us in the know refer to it, is really in the business of turning out superheroes who have the ability to right the wrongs of the world single-handedly and against overwhelming odds while biffing the dozy, incompetent and corrupt French in their own country into the bargain. The fact that the movie is directed by one Frenchman and written and produced by another suggests a deep psychological conflictedness that, alas, doesn't do anything to enliven this dull thriller.

What does is -- you'll never guess -- car chases! Of course I ironize. Christopher Orr might not be able to guess it, but the rest of us will without difficulty, particularly if we are familiar with the cinematic oeuvre of Pierre Morel and Luc Besson, director and writer-producer respectively, who earlier collaborated on the Transporter films. In addition to the car chases, of course, there are the usual superhero antics. You know what I mean. The craggily handsome hero -- here played by Liam Neeson -- walks into a room full of men with foreign accents and guns who are all eager to kill him, and, in a matter of seconds, he kills them instead. All of them. In Taken he does this, several times, in order to rescue a pure and virginal maiden -- his own daughter (Maggie Grace) captured by Albanian white slavers in Paris -- in order to make up for years of parental neglect while he was being a superhero for the CIA instead of freelancing, as he is now.

Of course, like all superheroes, he is incredibly lucky. Talk about all the breaks going a guy's way! With only 96 hours to rescue his daughter before she disappears forever, he finds that the first pimp he approaches, or who approaches him, is one of the Albanian gang of kidnappers. This person then inadvertently leads him straight to where a bunch of the kidnapped girls are kept, where he immediately finds one of them with his daughter's jacket. He extracts this drugged girl from her place of confinement, killing any number of those who have been charged with guarding her and the others, and takes her away in a car that, in the ensuing chase, is soon riddled with bullets, all of which fortunately miss both him and the girl. With his skills in pharmacology and medicine he then revives the girl and finds out from her where the bad guys hang out before proceeding to kill another house-full of them -- all except one, whom he tortures for the information he needs to find his daughter.

After that it gets a bit complicated, but you'll not be surprised to learn that his incredible luck holds -- as does the incredibly bad luck of yet another boat-load of bad guys. The surprising thing -- at least to me -- is that the scenes of torture are meant to make our hero more, not less sympathetic to us. The script even allows him to joke about it as he turns on the juice to shock the bad guy strapped to a chair. "You know, we used to outsource this stuff," he tells him meditatively. The trouble was that the power grids in the Third World countries that got the contracts were unreliable. Here in France, he tells him, "You either give me what I need or this switch will stay on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill." Of course, the guy gives him a name, Vincent St. Clair, but can give him no address, even under torture. He doesn't know, he says desperately. The good guy replies: "I believe you" -- and then, as he goes out of the room, he turns the electricity back on. "But that won't save you."

Ouch! This, says the New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis in a review headed "Vigilante Daddy Avenges Kidnapping," is "a repellent scene," which leads her to the further observation that "swarthy Europeans and Arabs may still be the villains du jour at the movies, but the Americans, including those with inexplicable Irish accents, are, alas, catching up." Like President Obama, in other words, Ms. Dargis thinks that we don't have to choose between our ideals and our security. And nobody's going to tell either of them any different. Thus, she simply refuses to accept the central dramatic premise of the movie -- surely not that unbelievable when compared to most of what it is asking us to swallow -- namely that, without the torture, the L.A. princess would have been on her way to some wicked sheikh's seraglio post haste. Only by torture (not to mention all the indiscriminate killing) is daddy able to save her. And this makes him a "vigilante" and a "villain"? Well, in that bastion of enlightened progressivism, the New York Times, I guess it does.

Presumably, in his position, Manohla Dargis would have stuck to her high-minded principles and fed the virginal princess to the big bad wolf. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be an all-bad idea. At least daddy might have left her in the company of the wicked sheikh for a while before rescuing her -- and killing him -- in the hope that she would come out of the experience a little less spoiled and princessy and a little more humble instead of being launched, more or less immediately upon rescue, into her career as a celebrity singer -- again with daddy's never-failing help. But then I suppose that superheroes must be expected to spawn other superheroes or they're not really superheroes. The 13-year-olds would protest.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (23) | Leave a comment

Stuart Koehl| 4.7.09 @ 6:28AM

Hey, Bowman:

Only wannabes call it "The Company". At Langley, everyone calls it "The Agency".

Stuart Koehl| 4.7.09 @ 6:38AM

By the way, if you were the father of teenage girls, you would have found Taken a wonderfully cathartic fanatasy.

John W.| 4.7.09 @ 9:24AM

Stuart Koehl| 4.7.09 @ 6:28AM
Hey, Bowman:

Only wannabes call it "The Company". At Langley, everyone calls it "The Agency".

Great. Now you've told everybody.

Trotter| 4.7.09 @ 10:38AM

Stuart:

Would your "revelation" fall into the liberal category of "outing CIA operatives"?

As for the movie, sounds like a rehash of about a thousand other movies. I think I'll stick to the DVD collection.

L. Ross| 4.7.09 @ 10:56AM

I saw "Taken", and just loved it, start to finish. Mr. Bowman, I don't think you have the proper mental mindset to enjoy the work of Luc Besson, who also gave us "The 5th Element", and "La Femme Nikita". I love his work, and highly recommend it.

To me, the best thing about "Taken" and Liam Neeson's role in the film, is simply his lack of hesitation. Liam does not spend a lot of time second guessing himself, but he does spend a lot of time killing muslims, which makes it a winner in my book.

JS| 4.7.09 @ 1:08PM

Geezus, when are people going to get it through their thick skulls that its a Hollywood ACTION MOVIE. Of coarse it is going to be filled with unbelievable action and far-fetched plot tools that move the story forward. Hell, even the vaunted Bourne Series has a ton of plot contrivances but most of us are able to turn our "asshat" switch to "off" and enjoy these movies. Good grief.

Doctor Right| 4.7.09 @ 1:37PM

Mr. Bowman:

You didn't like the highly entertaining 2008 blockbuster "Ironman". Instead of accepting it for what it was, an action film, and allowing yourself to relax and enjoy it, you tried to dissect it as "film"...And made a complete fool of yourself.

You didn't like "Taken"? That tells me one thing:

I need to get it from NETFLIX as soon as possible.

Please, Mr. Bowman...Stick to writing reviews of existential Czech film, and leave the movies to us "lumpenproles" in fly-over country.

vatvince| 4.7.09 @ 2:07PM

Gentlemen:
For your edification: in my many years in serving as a Foreign Service Officer in six US embassies, I never once heard the expression, "The Company" used by employees of the CIA. It was, without exception, "the Agency."
However, what might also interest you is that, historically, one organization did use the
moniker "the Company" to describe themselves: at the founding of The Society of Jesus," aka the Jesuits.
Salutem plurimam dicere

imxio| 4.7.09 @ 2:37PM

Hell yeah. I'd rather face off with a CIA agent than a Jesuit.

Bill in NJ| 4.7.09 @ 3:14PM

Thank you "L. Ross".
With that endorsement, I will definetly watch the movie. Isn't cathartic release what action movies are all about?

Jim| 4.7.09 @ 4:09PM

In general I do not like "Action Movies," but I enjoyed "Taken." Loaned to me by a friend, I had no idea what the movie was about and would probably not have rented it. It is all in the making I guess.

gregorbo| 4.7.09 @ 9:45PM

Okay--I'm convinced that most have not understood Mr. Bowman's critique of the film (Or rather, his critique of a critique of the film). He (BowmanJ) writes:
"Presumably, in his position, Manohla Dargis would have stuck to her high-minded principles and fed the virginal princess to the big bad wolf. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be an all-bad idea. At least daddy might have left her in the company of the wicked sheikh for a while before rescuing her -- and killing him -- in the hope that she would come out of the experience a little less spoiled and princessy and a little more humble instead of being launched."

Isn't this the expression of moral equivalence (by the film)? Isn't Bowman castigating a movie for equivocating between a Western (i.e. psuedo-Christian's) father rescuing his daughter from Mid-Eastern terrorists, who feel that torturing and killing that daughter is mandated by their moral code, even as her rescue and the punishment of her torturers is mandated by the code of her Western father? Isn't Bowman pointing out that this then becomes just one of Hollywood's attempts to convince us that moral codes are quaint and equal--and thereby equally valid (which means, equally invalid)?

If I'm wrong, sir James, set me straight.

brutus| 4.7.09 @ 9:52PM

The 13 year old in me will probably enjoy "Taken." That said, even though it seems Mr. Bowman pans almost every movie, I still enjoy reading his reviews. This one reminds me of his "True Lies" review, way back in '94. It was also a pan, but I enjoyed it so much I can still quote him: "...swarthy featured foreigners dancing at the end of a stream of American bullets." Now that's good prose. Keep it up, Mr. Bowman.

wanumba| 4.7.09 @ 10:58PM

The teenaged daughters loved it. It's a little chick-daddy flick. Dads are put down terribly all over the media, daily, constantly. They loved seeing a dad who'd go get his daughter, in the Hoo-rah sense. Ahhnold did it with Commando, but Liam looks more normal, deceptively bland. Thought Hollywood was being the height of hypocrisy, but the French did it, so the torture was all guilt-free catharsis - waterboarding is waaaay less lethal than .. well everything in the movie. Daughters don't want to go to France anymore, so good for our budget.

Bilwick| 4.8.09 @ 9:33AM

In one of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm novels (forget the Dean Martin cartoon version: the novels were rougher and tougher, and written for adults), Helm's daughter is kidnapped by The Other Side, and Helm finds out his paramour is working for them and knows where the daughter is. She refuses to tell him, and time is of the essence. So Helm tortures her. It's done "off-stage," with no sadistic details: One chapter ends with Helm promising the paramour, "You'll talk" as he opens a folding knife; the next chapter begins with Helm washing the blood off his hands. The paramour dies in the process, but not before she gives Helm the information needed to rescue his daughter. Was he wrong to do that? I've never had children but there have certainly been people in my life that I hope I would have the nerve to do something like that for, if it meant saving their lives.

ABC| 4.8.09 @ 11:27AM

By far and away, Mr. Bowman is my favorite film reviewer and has been for many years. He is the only reviewer who sees the movie in the context of the big-picture real world. His reviews are more essays on the moral, philosophical and anthropological thoughts prompted by the movie. In so doing, he is a thousand times more interesting than the usual idiotic commentary on what occurs solely on the screen. And he is right: Hollywood is no longer capable of making movies for adults except occasionally, seemingly by mistake. Thank you, Mr. Bowman.

Roy| 4.8.09 @ 8:44PM

Re: Brutus: I know, lol. One of mine too.

Re: other posters: I wouldn't say this is too much of a pan. Mr. Bowman understands this is an action movie and reviews it as such. He gets in a few digs at the genre as a whole but they are well deserved and in any case it can handle it. It's like pointing out that WWF wrestling is fake. Just as well to do it every so often even though everybody knows it. What's funny is the first paragraph where he brings up another critic who mentions that a kids film is directed at kids. Yep, and yep, action films are still filled with unrealistic gun fights and car chases.

Sexy Costumes| 9.5.09 @ 9:26PM

What a stupid idea a holiday for HARVEY MILK thats just what we need another stupid PC holiday for sime freak jerk liberal SEAN PENN is a stupid annoying liberal jerk and i,ll
sexy lingerie lingerie never ever watch any of his stupid putrid movies their nothing but junk