Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Taken


Watched a couple of good movies recently. Last Friday, after putting the little ones to bed, we watched Taken, starring Liam Neeson.

Suffice it to say that now my daughters will never experience Paris – or anywhere outside, say, a twenty-mile radius of wherever I happen to be – by themselves.

Liam’s a down-on-his-luck divorcee who quits his job and takes a crappy apartment to be near his seventeen-year-old daughter, who now lives in a mansion with mom and her wealthy stepfather. He wants to make up for lost time and finally be a good dad. His ex kinda coerces and guilts him into allowing the daughter to take a trip un-chaperoned to Paris. Then, the S hits that fan. The daughter is abducted, and is actually on the phone with her father while this is happening. Fortunately, though, Liam is ex-CIA; think of a 50-year-old retired Jason Bourne. Before long, bodies pile up as he makes his way through the seedy underworld of Europe. Hell hath no fury like a special forces father getting his daughter back from kidnappers.

There’s a somewhat famous scene where Liam gets on the cell phone with the abductor just after the daughter is taken:

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

There’s a long pause as Liam awaits a response, any response.

Then, in an evil whisper, the kidnapper replies:

Good luck.

Thus begins our heart-warming tale of kicking ass.

The movie’s great; if this is your bag, see it, see it, see it. I’ll probably buy it once the video stores start selling off their copies. But there’s a joke in here somewhere. All fathers feel this same way towards their daughters. We’ll kill for them, if necessary. However, obviously, not all fathers are ex-CIA enforcers. If I got on the phone with my daughter’s abductor, what would I say? What skills do I have to make them sorry for what they did? “I’ll write very nasty things about you on my blog!” “I’ll hit you over the head with my ten-pound Encyclopedia of Science Fiction while you sleep!” What would really be clever would be a story in which a everyday, ordinary father has to stretch himself to outwit his foes rather than just beat the heck out of them, one by one, and save his little one.

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