I recently saw the surprise success movie from earlier this year, Taken. It's an action thriller starring Liam Neeson as a retired "badass" operative who must spring back into action to rescue his abducted daughter.When you get right down to it, this is a movie that is better than the sum of its parts. The script is nothing exceptional, but it is very tight. The film runs barely 90 minutes, but it hits all the expected beats in energetic ways that don't feel workman-like as many paint-by-numbers action films these days do. The directing is sharp and keeps you engaged in the action.
But where the movie really works is in the casting of Liam Neeson. He's just not the man you'd expect Hollywood to go to for this kind of movie. Even for a "retired badass," you'd expect to see dozens of other actors in this sort of role before him. But the movie is better than it would be precisely because they got someone who can act. It's very much like the casting of Matt Damon in the Bourne movies, or Daniel Craig as the newest James Bond -- you can get a real actor to act like a badass much more easily than you can get a skilled asskicker to actually act. And so as Neeson's character pursues his vendetta in this movie, you really feel every bit of it, and completely believe it. He comes off as one scary guy.
Also effective in the movie is Famke Janssen in a book-end role as the mother of the missing girl. That girl herself is played by Maggie Grace in a bit of casting that both works and doesn't. Her performance is strong when the tricky material could easily have made it bad, but she just looks too old to be playing a 17-year old girl. (That's two-thirds her actual age, by the way.)
Still, the movie is an undeniably fun ride, and far better than most movies of its type. I rate it a B.
4 comments:
some friends and I were discussing how we only quote movies from the 80s and how modern movies seem to lack any dialogue with lasting appeal. somehow "I have a particular set of skills" from this movie has stuck around and gets used.
trying to refrain from spoilers, because it's a good movie others should watch, given the subject matter of the cause of the abductions I thought the writing was very sharp with certain explanations. there was no obvious moment of unrealistic plot-stretching involved.
the mole
Among the more recent movies that have generated quotables in my circle is Tropic Thunder.
"What do YOU mean, 'you people?'"
Meh. I felt like I was watching an hour and a half (after Liam springs into action) long episode of 24. Neeson's cool, but I'd already seen enough of "bad-ass operative breaks all the rules to find his daughter in distress."
I think the comparisons to 24 are mostly fair. I suppose I'm saying I found this more compelling than I have 24 for a while. (Season 7 was definitely an improvement, but not a return to the quality of the earlier seasons.)
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