The movie "Taken" with Liam Neeson only had three thing wrong with it: the plot, the characters, and the dialogue. What's left? Well, the setting wasn't bad. "Taken" must be the way anyone who paid theater ticket prices to see it felt after they saw it.
Neeson played some sort of former special ops guy with a teen daughter named Kim whose goal of being a band groupie on a European tour got interrupted by her getting kidnapped in Paris by a gang of human traffickers.
This may spoil the ending for someone who hasn't seen it. But this action hero drama has Neeson in full non-custodial daddy hero mode going on a killing spree in Paris where he rescues the girl and brings her home to the custodial mom. If that didn't spoil it for you, be aware that the plot has more holes in it than Bonnie and Clyde's last car.
But here's the surprise ending. "Taken" took in an astonishing $226 million worldwide. So there's going to be a sequel:
Liam Neeson returns as Bryan Mills, the retired CIA agent with a particular set of skills who stopped at nothing to save his daughter Kim from Albanian kidnappers. When the father of one of the kidnappers swears revenge, and takes Bryan and his wife hostage during their family vacation in Istanbul, Bryan enlists Kim to help them escape, and uses the same advanced level of special forces tactics to get his family to safety and systematically take out the kidnappers one by one.
So the vengeful bad guy takes this super mma fighter, escape artist, and marksman hostage instead of just killing him outright. Only in the movies.
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