Taken

I've been meaning to watch this one for a while, mainly because the director is a young man called Pierre Morel who is responsible for one of the best action films of the last ten years.

So what's Taken like?

Well the fight scenes are good. To someone who's studied Ju Jitsu for two and a half years, they're a little showy at points but it's a film, that's what they're there for.

The espionage bits are also quite nice. Liam Neeson makes quite a good spy.

So if you're just after a film that kicks a fair bit of arse, go nuts, this film is for you.

For the rest of us, things aren't quite right, sadly.

Things go wrong from day one where Liam Neeson's Daughter has a birthday party at her step father's house. I say house, it's a mansion. She gets given a horse. A cunting horse. If the script writer thought this would make her a sympathetic character, they were wrong. When this girl gets kidnapped, it's more amusing than anything else. Imagine the headline:

"Spoiled bitch gets kidnapped. Everyone else in the world finds this faintly amusing."

Liam Neeson is hard to sympathise with as well. He's an ex-CIA spook who doesn't want his daughter to go to France, because it's dangerous. It's France. It's a hell of a lot less dangerous than America, for Bob's sake... No handguns, for a start.

Well, I say there are no handguns. Paris in this film appears to be playing Paris as seen through the eyes of an American. Every security officer that Liam encounters has a pistol at least, some have MP5's... I'm sure some French security have fire arms but I know they're not exactly fond of them over there.

The problem with the film, from a purely racial point of view, is that when Liam won't let his daughter go to France, because it's dangerous, and she does, and she does get kidnapped, the film is basically saying "Don't go to Europe, there be dragons".

I know this is kind of symptomatic of Bush era America but I expected more from a film directed by a french man and part written by Luc Besson.

Having said that, the other writer of Taken also wrote Kiss Of The Dragon, which is a considerably more sensible take on the City Of Culture. Maybe he had been watching Top Gun or something when he wrote this.

I feel like I'm taking the mild xenophobia a little too seriously, here. The problem is, that was the main feeling I got left behind with at the end of the film. Probably because there's not really much else there... The plot is... okay, the acting is... okay but there's no real suspense. Things just happen one after the other, a bit like in the first and second Harry Potter films.

It's not a bad film, by the way, it's just no-where near as good as War or Kiss Of The Dragon or any of the dozen other films that follow a very similar structure.