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TAKEN

Seeing as there was no films about Zombie Nazi’s left at the old blockbuster store, Inferno and myself decided to rent a more mainstream, but still blokey film. I had only heard good things about this movie and I was pretty optimistic.

The plot: Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA agent who is trying to be closer to his daughter as she grows into a young woman. The pressures of his old lifestyle has already broken his marriage and his daughter now lives with her cunt of a mother who has shacked up with some old rich dude that keeps trying to buy her affection. Mills realises that he has to make up for all the time he was away on missions as his daughter was growing up, when she asks if she can travel in Europe for a few weeks with a friend, he is reluctant but realises that he may loose her if he doesn’t allow her to grow up.

Turns out this was a bad idea, as she is only in France a few hours when her friend and her are kidnapped by Albanian pimps. She is on the phone to her father as it happens and he talks to one of the abductors, vowing to use his CIA skills to track them down and kill them all. When he arrives in France, it doesn’t take him long to start putting clues together and soon he is on to there case. Cue the onslaught of uber violence as he beats, shoots, explodes and brutally tortures his way through the European underworld in order to locate his beloved daughter.

Neeson is outstanding in this movie. To be honest, he has made a living out of playing stony faced serious types and you know what? He does it here again… but he does it so well that you just have to love him for it. He is about 55 now, but he still comes across as a pretty fit dude. You can honestly believe that he can handle himself as you are presented with him taking on an entire crack house full of Albanian scum bags and handing them the beat down of the millennium.

The violence is pretty extreme, not overly gory, just you can see the rage inside Nessons character as he desperately tries to get his daughter back. It soon becomes apparent that he will stop at nothing to achieve this. One scene in particular conveys this, he tortures a man by ramming two 6 inch nails into his thigh bones, then attaches them to the house mains via crocodile clips…. OOCHAAA!!! Also heads get smashed in car doors, a dude gets a broken bottle stabbed into his chest, another gets a fire extinguisher rammed off his face 8 or 9 times and more people get chopped in the throat than I care to remember.

This movie is dark and violent, but I still think that most women will still enjoy it, as every moment in this film, you can see the love that Neesons character has for his daughter. You know that although he is being a brutal monster at times, it is all spawned for that love that can never be broken. Have to say it again, Neeson is unbelievably good in this!!!

Dark, broody, violent, intelegent film making, that is a relief after this years wishy washy cinema realises.

Verdict: 9/10

Let it TAKE your attention to the darker side of life.