Taken (2009): B

Single-minded and suitably rough around the edges, Taken offers B-movie action via a story that plays out like a modern-day version of Hardcore. After a lifetime spent putting his covert-ops job before his family, divorcé Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), in an attempt to rehabilitate his relationship with 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), reluctantly agrees to let her take a trip to Paris. Mere minutes after her arrival, however, she’s snatched by Euroscum, which is bad news for the snatchers, given that Bryan is uniquely equipped to hunt and kill them. Director Pierre Morel (District B13) briskly sets-up and executes his premise, depicting globalization as having created terrifying new hazards for young, pretty, naïve girls, while also understatedly casting Bryan’s tactical skill-sets as akin to parenting. Taken stokes audience (especially male) rage with its little-girl-lost-into-sexual-slavery scenario, then satisfies bloodlust with a series of hectic, brutal fight scenes in which Neeson – looking spry and granite-tough – viciously dispatches hordes of Bosnian, French and Arab capitalist pigs and/or immoral deviants. Morel’s visually chopped-up action would have further benefited from the clean, muscular compositions of his District B13 set pieces, but it’s difficult to quibble with a lean, mean genre flick that has the ability to both thrill and – with a late-act gunshot to an innocent bystander – also surprise.