Feb 13 2009
Taken
Liam Neeson plays bad-ass well! Very well!
If Harrison Ford played Liam Neeson bad-ass in the last Indiana Jones movie it might have had a chance… Bottom line: bad-ass only works if, you are in fact, bad-ass!
Examples of Bad-ass:
You’re a Terminator like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator and Arnold is scary, unrepentant, unstoppable, and kills lots of people.
You’re Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction and you shoot Brett because you told him if he said “WHAT, one more time,” you would.
Examples of NOT Bad-ass:
You’re a Terminator like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and a little boy orders you not to kill anybody and you don’t—that’s not bad-ass, just bad.
You’re Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction and you let Jimmie Dimmick talk to you like you’re his bitch—I get it, it was Quentin Tarantino’s movie afterall…
Taken was as good as the preview, no—it was better, because it lived up to it.
The storyline was good because it bordered on being possible. Maybe it’s because as an audience we want to believe it was possible. The kind of evil that’s being battled was real enough—human trafficking and the sex trade of underage girls. Abductions in a foreign country are real enough. Government corruption and complicity are real enough. And finally ex-spy preventer Liam Neeson who plays Brian Mills, an obsessed ex-spy father whose daughter is abducted, is a as good as it gets as far as a combination of James Bond, Jason Bourne, John McClane, with two extra helpings of bad-ass!
I thought what made this movie different was that there was no delay, no hesitation of what needed to be done. There was no saying just shoot’em, don’t wait, shoot’em now—the bad guys were already dead!
Brian Mills was emotional yet almost dead-on-perfect in his execution. Brian brings the wrath we all wish we could be capable of bringing to the people trying to imprison their child as a sex slave.
Liam Neeson is believable in this role and I would guess there will be future iterations of his character—he was just too good for there not to be…
Go see Taken and you will be taken to and rescued from a place you know exists in the deepest bowels of hell on earth by a bad-ass dad!
