Did Liam Neeson retire? A former super agent or something running around Europe, being chased by the CIA and who knows who else, trying to save his own life as well as his daughter’s? Seems I have seen this before… only now we have a younger and considerably more handsome actor with Aaron Eckhart, which may justify the film’s existence.
There’s the usual plot devices: all of a sudden, your life is torn apart, your company disappeared, your bank accounts depleted, any trace of your existence evaporated. The reason is “your dark past”, of course, and sometimes it does not pay off to have kept your daughter in the dark about this dark past, because now you have to spend a lot of time while being chased around Antwerp and Brussels to provide monologues in order to bring her up to speed. At least now we, the audience, also know what’s going on, and that it’s all about a super secret … thingy… honestly, I forgot… but you need to have great lock-tampering abilities to get it, and that’s why our friend is in trouble, because he knows too much about all that. In any case, the documents in question threaten the existence of a company that sounded like Haliburton but I must have misheard, maybe Hurtonbali, never mind, their boss is a mean old man and wants his files back, and our eager daddy agent is happy to exchange his daughter against the files he nicked before. Oh now I remember, something to do with a ship’s manifest proving illegal arms deals. …never mind…
It is very conventional… still entertaining of sorts, but there really is no reason to add more items to the “Taken” playlist, unless you have something really new and interesting to tell. This one hasn’t, and it is already drowning in the grey mists of my memory… Good luck I am keeping this blog, or else a year from now I would never have any chance of remembering a single thing about it.
For some reason there are two different titles floating around about the film, the other being “Erased”:
thomas4cinema 