Taken (Pierre Morel 2008)
Posted on March 17 at 18.04, 2009 by Eric Mahleb
I recently read about Luc Besson’s growing empire and felt a bit disheartened about the rise of French-sponsored trash and brainless cinema. So what do i do? I go and watch Taken, the latest film from Besson’s Europacorp, hoping perhaps to confirm my worst fears, but also curious about Liam Neeson, an actor i respect, playing the tough guy who stops at nothing to find his kidnapped daughter.
And the result was not overly disappointing. Less fluffly than Ransom (1996) but not as decent as Frantic (1988). Neeson makes for a credible ex-secret service (or something like that) guy who is well-versed into the art of finding foreign baddies and killing them swiftly. Taken has a violent and direct intensity that brings the last two James Bond films to mind, and it could be said that Liam Neeson would make a good older version of Bond. He ends up carrying the film and allows it to become a somewhat enjoyable experience.
Taken doesn’t fly very high but it is not made to. It is cheap cinema (literally, since one of the ways Europacorp is making a profit by keeping budgets low) aimed at a specific audience. If this sounds like Business Class 101, it’s because it is. Increase profits, keep costs low, go after a target market, spend heavily on marketing…cinema has always been a business for studios in countries where the government offers little or no subsidies. This state of affairs only becomes a serious problem when the art component of cinema is completely left out of the equation and when films become synonymous with commodity and production. Which is clearly what Europacorp is doing and that is indeed regrettable.
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