So I watched “Taken”

teenybuffalo:

Jesus O’Callahan Christ, that was a shitty movie.

OK, so I
recently realized that I have a Thing about Liam Neeson. Partly it’s
because he looks the way I feel inside (ponderous, friendly, bewildered,
well-meaning, wondering whether he left the oven on). But partly I also
have a crush on him. Deep in my heart, I want him to hold me, pat me on
the back and say, “Hey… hey, sweetheart, it’s going to be all right.”
It’s one of those life goals or wife goals? situations. It’s
confusing, but that’s all right with me. What it means is that I’m
watching every movie that looks like it might be interesting that
contains Liam Neeson.

Yesterday I watched Taken (2009). I feel dirty now.

For those of you who were lucky enough not to see it: Taken
is a thriller where Liam Neeson plays a guy called Bryan Mills who goes
to Paris and murders brown people. Like, really a lot of them. Also he
tortures guys with an electric cable hooked up to alligator clips, but
it’s totes OK for him to do that because the victim is an Albanian human
trafficker, and torture produces 100% reliable intelligence every time.
People whom Bryan Mills variously shoots, bashes on the head, and
nonfatally maims include a whole lot of workers on a construction site
(who may be exploiting women in a rape house, but who also may just be
poor jerks hired by the day who have no idea anything bad is happening),
and the servers at a big expensive party. (In order to get close to one
of Team Evil, he bashes a series of waiters and replaces them. You know
those poor servers were hired from Event Temps by the day and are just
here to earn a few francs. That one really pissed me off.)

You
can’t dismiss any of this as “Our hero is shown doing objectively bad
things in order to achieve his goals,” because Bryan Mills is always
right, never kills anyone who didn’t have it coming, and has a
near-total success rate. The audience is primed to go, admirable.

Shall
I add that Team Evil are almost all Middle Eastern men who tend to have
bad teeth and straggly beards? Or that they’re covered in signifiers
like crescent-and-star tattoos, or that the final boss is known only as
“the Sheik”? The only racist/anti-Muslim stereotype they didn’t hit is
“terrorist suicide bomber.” It’s surprising that Taken only came out in 2009. I’d thought it was much earlier, like 2003. Bryan Mills is basically the US marching on Baghdad.

This
is all happening because Bryan Mills’ teenaged daughter went to Europe
with her idiot friend. Never go to Paris! You hear me, young ‘uns?!
(I’ve read that Liam Neeson has had a lot of people come up to him and
say that they’ll certainly never go to Europe after seeing THAT film,
gracious no.) Daughter Girl, whose name I instantly forgot, is a living
plot token with a personality consisting of being a virgin. Her idiot
friend is not a virgin, so she won’t survive. We are also directed not
to care about the umpteen other young women who’ve been filled with
drugs and presumably raped. Take note, insecure middle-aged men who
watch this movie for a power trip: your daughters are your property,
their virginity is what makes them valuable, and the world is full of
generically ethnic evil men who want to rape them.

Daughter Girl
is played by a grown woman whose idea of acting like a teenager is to
shriek and jump up and down a lot. Mind you, everyone else is
one-dimensional as well. I understand that no one checked into this
movie for Shakespearean levels of complexity, they checked in to watch
Liam Neeson punch people, but even so, my intelligence felt insulted by
this movie. The character arc that went “Guy has poor relationship with
daughter and is undervalued as a person -> daughter imperilled ->
guy kills a lot of people -> daughter loves him and everyone else
also validates him” just made me sad because it was worked out in
strokes about as broad as I just stated. I feel badly for the men who
need that as a wish-fulfillment story.

To top it all off, this
movie didn’t even give me Liam Neeson doing anything that another actor
couldn’t have done about as well. It was a very poor and bland use of
him. Most of the time. There were a few moments of Bryan Mills being
kind to distraught women, like the pop star for whom he does security or
the drugged girl he rescues from the construction site, which looked
particularly good coming from Liam Neeson. (And I got needs.) Most of
the time, though, he just played Generic McPuncherson–and with a
half-baked American accent, to boot.

Ah well, my time was not
quite wasted–at least I found out that I wasn’t missing much, and can
avoid his other action movies (or the Taken sequels, God help us). My friend K. and I are going to watch Michael Collins on
Monday night, which I understand is a much better use of Liam Neeson,
and also involves Alan Rickman as Eamon de Valera (we’ve been holding a
long protracted wake for Alan Rickman and making some lovely discoveries
in his body of work).

I need something cute to take the bad taste out of my mouth. Here is Liam Neeson talking about the time he hit a deer very lightly with his motorcycle, and here he is recording voices for Good Cop Bad Cop from The Lego Movie. I haven’t seen that one yet, but Neeson going “Wakey wakeeeeey…” is making me think I’ve been missing out. 

For a unicorn chaser, have you seen Neeson on Sesame Street (apologies if you were the one who posted it in the first place)?