More damning even than not featuring a single strong female character, is the fact that the filmmakers go out of their way to get the audience to dislike many of the women in the film. Bryan’s ex-wife, Lenore, for instance, takes Bryan to task for his hesitancy to let Kim go to Paris with her friend. But since the audience already knows that Kim is going to get kidnapped, and thus that Bryan’s fears are very warranted, it makes Lenore look like a stuck up, ignorant moron. And when Bryan eventually has to tell Lenore that Kim’s been taken, there’s a weird feeling along the lines of ‘serves the bitch right.’The only other female character of any real note in the film (aside from Kim and Lenore) is Amanda, the friend with whom Kim goes to Paris. Amanda is little more than a stereotype of the stupid American tourist, obnoxious, annoying and anxious to get it on with a Frenchman because ‘they’re good in bed.’ When Bryan eventually finds her dead from an overdose in a rundown apartment complex, the audience’s reaction, if it has one at all, is not one of sadness or sorrow but a shrug, as if to say, ‘She sucked anyway.’
Despite being the object of our hero’s attention, Kim doesn’t fare much better. Played by the twenty-six-year-old Maggie Grace, Kim behaves more like a pre-teen than the seventeen-year-old she's supposed to be. Dressed in incredibly conservative and childish clothes (especially considering that she lives in Beverly Hills), Kim is constantly running everywhere, hopping up and down when she gets her way and declaring her love for her father and stepfather only after they give her gifts. It’s the sort of behavior one would call childish in a fourteen-year-old. I’d be terrified to let someone like that go to Europe unsupervised too.
That European trip is another example of where the film is inexplicably out of touch with reality. Though she tells Bryan that she’s just going to visit museums in Paris, Kim’s secret plan is to follow U2 around the continent for a couple weeks. U2? Really? What year is this, 1987? What teenager in 2009 is that into a bunch of past their prime rockstars from the 80s?
You could say I’m making too much out of what turns out to be a relatively minor plot point (especially considering that Kim and Amanda never actually make it to a single concert) but it’s indicative of the lazy writing all around. Any time one of the characters opens their mouths (as opposed to just bashing each other with their fists, in which case the film usually satisfies), anything that comes out is incredibly banal and nowhere close to how people actually speak. Take, for instance, an early scene where Bryan hangs out with his old CIA buddies. The point of the scene is to establish that Bryan used to be a CIA operative and that he gave it up so he could be closer to his daughter. If that last sentence was an actual line of dialogue, it would have sounded more natural than the clumsy way those two points are inserted into the conversation. And it only gets worse from there.
What then to make of the film’s massive popularity? The action sequences, while directed in that inexplicably popular, shaking-camera, no-sense-of-geography, impossible-to-tell-what’s-going-on sort of way, are effectively suspenseful and brutal. Liam Neeson’s performance is committed and compelling. And the actual plot of the film is pretty smart for a standard genre film. But none of that sufficiently explains why people like the film as much as they do.
I think there are a couple reasons for this. The first is that Neeson is a very unlikely actor for the role. He looks and acts just like any other average middle-aged guy. So it’s something of a thrill to see him being such a bad ass. And since the audience never sees what he was like back when he was in the CIA, they can almost imagine that this quest for his daughter has given him these abilities. After all, we’d all like to think that if we were in his shoes, we’d be capable of doing what he does. And since Neeson looks like an average joe, that feeds into the audience’s delusion just enough so that they get more of a kick out of the film than if, say, Bruce Willis was in the lead role.
The second reason I think the film has connected with audiences is that the steps Neeson takes on his quest to get his daughter back are smarter and more interesting than what you’d expect from a film like this. (Mills’s hiring of a translator to decipher the bugged conversations of a couple of Albanian gangsters is a particularly clever highlight.) Even stupid thrillers tend to be at least a little entertaining because, whatever their faults, they’re suspenseful and action packed. But the fact that Taken’s plot mechanics are smart, allows the audience to unapologetically enjoy the film. And that’s a crucial difference. Thrillers of this sort always have an audience (or else people like Luc Besson, responsible for the abhorrent Transporter films, wouldn’t have a career), but if you can trick people into thinking there’s more to the film than the standard thriller machinations, people turn out in droves. Even the cineastes, who love to abhor most films like this, can support it because it has the illusion of being intelligent.
Unfortunately, when you look a little closer at Taken, you find a film that’s a whole lot uglier than most others of its ilk. In fact, were it not for the effectively rendered thriller aspects, the film would have long since been vilified for its rampant misogyny and promptly forgotten. I guess it just goes to show you that a little bit of intelligence and a couple decent action scenes cover up a multitude of sins.
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