Word: manness
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...Taken could have been a real movie, and a good one. It spices its torture-porn premise - a man trying to save his daughter from being peddled as the tender meat in a white-slave ring - with Neeson's stolid, solid presence. But the film promises so much more than it delivers that by the end, I felt like registering a complaint with the Obama Administration's consumer-protection squad...
...hurtling over roofs, through transoms and down staircases, all without the aid of a digital art brush. Morel, a cinematographer directing his first feature, kept things moving and snarling with a scuzzy brio and made expert use of the artless screen presence of the leading men (one a stunt man, the other a co-creator of parkour). The picture barely broke $1 million at the North American box office, but you can bet the makers of the Bourne and Bond films were watching...
...Both Morel movies were produced and co-written by Luc Besson, who's a one-man French film industry. He earned his early rep as a writer-director with Subway, a vivacious crime melodrama, then made the Hollywood-influenced thrillers La Femme Nikita and The Professional (which introduced Natalie Portman) and the Bruce Willis sci-fi hit The Fifth Element. Rarely directing movies anymore, he's produced nearly 70 of them this decade, most set in Paris, many in English, including the Transporter series and a couple of Jet Li action adventures. Besson is Hollywood in another...
...happening.") And like most other action heroes, he's an all-or-nothing-at-all fellow. An indifferent husband to Lenore (Famke Janssen, this time looking less than her usual obscenely fabulous), who's remarried and can't stand him, Bryan is trying to redeem himself as a family man by paying extra attention to his daughter...
...Morel hadn't stranded his cast in dialogue scenes with lumpy rhythms and action choreography that has a low plausibility factor, I'd guess that Taken means to be a critique of a man as fascinated by his daughter's endangered purity as her predators are - and, by extension, of the thriller genre's obsessive hero. Back in the '70s, a cop film mined the similarities between the man with the badge and the criminal he hunted. That was The French Connection, whose wary sympathy for, and exposé of, the cop played by Gene Hackman won the movie...