Revenge Is Sweet

Once again, Hollywood is in shock over the unexpected success of a movie to which no one gave a second thought. Last week it was Paul Blart: Mall Cop. This week, it’s Taken, a kidnap-and-rescue thriller set in Paris but made in English, the work of a team of French filmmakers whose movies make fortunes at home and around the world and have basically laid an egg in the United States. (The Fifth Element? Angel-A? B-13? Léon? Do these titles mean nothing to you? Well, then, join the club.)

This time, Pierre Morel (director) and Luc Besson (writer-producer) have taken the Hollywood rulebook and put it through the shredder. In the movie’s third weekend, Taken‘s box-office take declined by a mere 8 percent. That happens only to successful children’s movies, never to R-rated films for adults. The audience is holding steady because people are returning to Taken a second or third time, and because they are telling all their friends to see it.

So what is it that is causing all the rumpus? Taken is a quick, brutal, beautifully photographed B-movie with absolutely nothing on its mind, perfectly fine if you like that sort of thing, but in no way memorable except for the presence of Liam Neeson. He plays the protagonist, an American ex-spy with an Irish accent (the movie never bothers explaining this) whose teenage daughter is kidnapped by white slavers at Orly Airport.

Neeson has overwhelming power. He’s a mountain of a man, and he moves with leonine authority. I’ve seen him act in the theater four times now, and he has without question the most physically commanding stage presence of any performer in my lifetime. Taken just keeps the camera on him, and in part, the financial triumph belongs to Neeson, who may actually become an international box office sensation at the age of 56 because of it.

But Neeson’s turn as the star of Taken can’t explain the movie’s staying power. Only one thing can: the killing. When his daughter is first kidnapped, the movie contrives to get him on the phone with her captor. Neeson explains that the kidnappers have made a mistake. He is trained to deal with these situations. If the kidnappers let his daughter go, he will drop the matter right there. But if they don’t, he will come after them and he will kill them.

And oh, how he does. He kills them with guns. He kills them with knives. He kills them with his bare hands. He throws them through windows. He kills them three at a time, four at a time. And he does all this while he is completely sleep-deprived. He even shoots somebody’s wife in the arm who is a completely innocent bystander just to get the man’s attention and cooperation. He only has 96 hours to save his daughter, and save her he is going to.

But even all this killing, with no agonizing and no worrying and no moments of pained self-reflection, doesn’t quite get at what is so viscerally effective about Taken. What matters is the nature of the people Neeson is killing. They’re very bad people. They are seizing girls traveling alone, they’re drugging them, and they’re selling them off to fantastically rich men as sex slaves, never to be seen again. They deserve to die, and seeing Neeson mete out the justice is a satisfying kind of reptilian-brain wish fulfillment.

Still, we haven’t quite gotten at the true nature of the bad guys Neeson dispatches. And here’s the thing: They’re not just white slavers, not just bad guys, not just slave-keepers. They’re Muslims.

Now, the movie doesn’t make a really big deal out of this. The slavers, you see, are Albanians. They come from a single small town, and by the time Neeson is through with them, the town’s annual tax revenues have sunk to maybe two leks a year. But the fact is that Albanians are mostly Muslim, around 70 percent. And the men-or rather, the men cast in Taken-look like they would be more at home in a café in Beirut than in a town on the Eastern shore of the Adriatic.

Once Liam is done with them, he has to take on their customers. And here he comes crosswise of some unambiguous Arabs. They’re on a yacht, they have machine guns, and they work for a big fat old fellow in a white burnoose who looks a little like King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In the big standoff with Liam, the sheikh actually takes out a scimitar and holds it across Liam’s daughter’s throat.

In conclusion, then: Taken is a nothing movie, albeit one with an exciting star, by a filmmaking duo notably unsuccessful in the United States. But it’s about an American who goes to rescue his innocent daughter, slaughters dozens of evil Muslims in the process, and doesn’t give it a second’s thought.

Taken is a 9/11 revenge fantasy, even if audiences don’t quite know it, and its success reveals that even now, more than eight years after the attacks, a somewhat well-wrought version of such a fantasy has the power to seize the American imagination.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.