Get Taken away with Liam Neeson on DirecTV Pay Per View Cinema

This past weekend, I rented Taken on Satellite TV Pay-Per-View Cinema. The movie was a 24-hour rental and was $4.99. It's also available in 1080P if you have a Plus HD DVR.

Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired Secret Service agent who has left the service to be closer to his daughter Kim (played by Maggie Grace). His ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) has remarried, and Bryan is trying to make up for lost time with his daughter, despite being overshadowed by the first-rate treatment Kim gets from her stepfather (Bryan gives Kim a karaoke machine for her birthday; Stepdaddy gives her a horse. Who do you think she loves more?) Kim convinces Bryan to let her travel to Paris with her friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy), and reluctantly he agrees, but not before setting a laundry list of rules for her to follow. When the girls arrive in Paris they share a cab with a stranger named Peter, and Amanda lets it slip that they are alone in Paris. Turns out that Peter is working for an Albanese gang, and he tips them off to the girls' whereabouts. The human traffickers kidnap the girls, only Kim manages to call her father before she is snatched to give him some information on her kidnappers. Using this, and his former Secret Service knowledge, Bryan hops on a plane to Paris in a race against time to rescue his daughter.

As far as the movie goes, I had heard only good things about it from my friends and coworkers who had seen it, so I went in with high expectations. Simply put, the movie is entertaining and at 90 minutes it moves along briskly. However, that doesn't stop it from being a pretty by-the-numbers thriller, though a few parts did surprise me with their brutality (Neeson shooting a woman in the shoulder in order to get information from her husband was one part that shocked me.) Once Neeson gets to Paris it's a non-stop crusade against the men who took his daughter, and Neeson doesn't waste any time in disposing of the traffickers (shootings and broken necks abound.)

The one thing that set the movie back was the casting of Maggie Grace. Now I realize that older actors play teens in movies all the time, that's nothing new, but there was something annoying about the way Grace portrayed her character here. It's as if the director said "Now remember, you're supposed to be 17, so act how a 17 year-old would act" and somehow Grace perceived that as acting like a 5 year-old. Seriously, the girl seems to think that playing 17 must mean you run to everything (such as when she meets her Dad at a restaurant and happily runs to greet him), only she runs like a 5 year-old who should be riding the short bus. It was a very strange acting choice, and it sort of took away from the authenticity of the movie. I also have a hard time believing that there were no teen actresses out there who couldn't have done a better job with the performance. It's not as if Maggie Grace is the only working actress in Hollywood who is capable of playing a teenager. Sorry, Mr. Director, but putting your 27 year-old actress in baby doll dresses does not make her a believable teen. Most teens today don't act like that anyway.

Overall, I would recommend this movie to fans of action, suspense, and drama. It's better than those slick, overglossed Michael Bay productions because it's simple, gritty, and intense. As I said, it's pretty by-the-books, but that's not always such a bad thing. Sometimes you just want to sit back and have a beer and enjoy a movie that doesn't ask for much. If that's you on a Friday or Saturday night, then Taken is just the movie for you.

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By: Frank Bilotta