Super Frat

If only Liam Neeson kicked this much ass in the Star Wars movie.  Taken is a pretty standard action movie done really, really well.  Written by Luc Besson of The Professional, fame and directed by Pierre Morel, cinematographer from the Transporter, the French duo crafts a movie that starts kicking ass and doesn’t stop until the body count is waaaay up there.

Liam plays an ex-CIA guy (how many English guys do we have in the CIA anyway) who gave up his career to try and reconnect with his daughter, now turning 17.  The set up is well paced and even engaging.  (My immediate reaction was, “Get to the killing!” but then I was like, “Hey these characters are interesting.”)  Liam’s ex-wife, her new husband, his CIA buddies—  They all come off as real.  And you feel like you could watch this character in a series saving people week after week.

You see the basic set up in this movie in the trailer.  His daughter goes to Paris and gets herself kidnapped, but the kidnappers have made a terrible mistake.  Liam is going to kill them.  The action sequences are smartly done.  Our hero isn’t superman, he just knows how to kill you.  And when you see what incredible scumbags the bad guys are, you won’t lose a wink of sleep watching them go down one by one.

One of the more shocking moments of this action-fest is when Liam greets an old buddy at dinner with his wife.   What happens is messed up, but the justification is there.  That’s how scummy the bad guys are in this.  I learned two things from this movie 1) Never go to Paris and 2) Don’t piss off Liam Neeson.  Because he will find you and he will kill you.  Once Liam gets to Paris, don’t go to the bathroom bros, because the action starts then and it doesn’t stop until a whole lot of Albanian gangsters are dead.  I think even people that don’t really like action/revenge movies (hello ladies) will get behind the Liam Neeson character, because the groundwork is laid out early on and he is, at heart, a swell guy.  (Even if he killed a whole lot of people.)

I give this movie 9 keggers out of 10.  Bros, this movie kicks major ass.