10++++ / 10
Official trailer
Liam Neeson was fifty-six years old when he played Bryan Mills. He had been a respected dramatic actor for two decades and wasn’t considered an action star, and the film Pierre Morel shot in thirty-six days in Paris transformed him into the most reliable action lead of his generation.
The film accidentally created the late-career-Neeson genre that’s produced approximately one film per year for the past fifteen years. None of the later films have matched the original.
Taken puts a grin on my face that very few action films manage. It’s mean, fast and completely sure of itself, and Neeson plays Bryan Mills like a man who knows exactly how dangerous he is and sees no reason to raise his voice about it. He tells the kidnappers what he’s going to do and then spends the film doing it, and I enjoy every minute of watching them find out he meant it.
I’d defend every one of those plus signs. The film does one thing and does it perfectly. There’s no fat. There’s no filler. There’s no subplot that wastes time. The screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen identifies the dramatic question in the opening fifteen minutes and answers it efficiently for the remainder of the runtime. The result is ninety-three minutes of pure action storytelling that respects the audience by refusing to waste a single scene on anything that doesn’t advance the central pursuit.
The Setup
Bryan Mills is a retired CIA operative who has relocated to Los Angeles to be closer to his teenage daughter Kim. His ex-wife Lenore has remarried a wealthy businessman who has been providing Kim with the kind of life Bryan’s intelligence career never could. Bryan is struggling to reconnect with his daughter. Kim is seventeen. Kim wants to travel to Paris with a friend named Amanda to follow U2 across Europe. Bryan reluctantly signs the permission form after extracting promises about her safety.
Kim and Amanda arrive in Paris. They share a taxi from the airport with an Albanian man named Peter. Peter tells the trafficking ring where the two American girls are staying. Albanian operatives kidnap both girls from the apartment. Kim manages to call her father during the abduction. Bryan listens to his daughter being taken. The famous phone speech follows. Bryan tells the kidnappers that he has a very particular set of skills, that he’ll find them, and that he’ll kill them. The kidnappers don’t believe him.
The remaining seventy-eight minutes of the film show that they should have believed him.
The Phone Call
The phone call is the structural pivot of the film and the most quoted action movie dialogue of the past twenty years.
Bryan is on the phone with Kim when the kidnappers enter the apartment. He tells her to hide under the bed and to be quiet, and he explains what to do when she’s caught. She should call out the details of the men taking her and, when one of the kidnappers grabs the phone, say what she just witnessed.
Kim recites height, build, hair color, and the fragment of language she heard.
Bryan then speaks to the kidnapper, and this is the monologue I’d put in a time capsule.
Bryan says he doesn’t know who they are or what they want. If they want ransom, he says, he doesn’t have money. What he does have is a very particular set of skills, acquired over a long career, and those skills make him a nightmare for people like the kidnapper.
He announces that if they release his daughter now, that will be the end of it. He announces that if they don’t release her, he’ll look for them, he’ll find them, and he’ll kill them.
The kidnapper says “good luck” and hangs up. His response is one of the great action movie misjudgments. He doesn’t believe what he’s just been told, and he’s about to learn that he should have believed it. The remainder of the film is the demonstration. Bryan does what he said he’d do. The kidnapper and everyone tied to him pays for the dismissive response to a direct warning.
The phone call works because Neeson delivers it without theatrical excess.
Never rising or breaking, the voice is the controlled voice of a man explaining the consequences of an action that’s already been taken. The performance choice is what raises the dialogue from genre cliché to real threat. Other actors might have shouted or wept. Neeson stated. The statement is the threat.
For Writers
The Taken phone call shows how dialogue can carry threat through restraint instead of through volume. Bryan doesn’t shout. Bryan doesn’t curse. Bryan doesn’t deliver theatrical proclamations. Bryan announces facts with the calm of a man stating what’s going to happen. The calm is the threat. The audience understands that anyone who can announce kidnap consequences this calmly is a person whose consequences will be real.
The lesson for writers is that quiet dialogue can be more menacing than loud dialogue when the speaker is dangerous.
Dangerous people don’t need to perform danger. Their position, instead of their volume, establishes their danger. If your character is dangerous, write the character speaking quietly. The audience will fill in the threat and respond more strongly to restraint than to performance.
The Neeson Factor
Liam Neeson was the third or fourth choice for the role.
Multiple action stars passed on the script before Neeson signed. He reportedly took the role because the production was shooting in Paris and he wanted to spend time in the city with his sons after the death of his wife Natasha Richardson. The role was supposed to be a paycheck and a vacation. It became one of the defining performances of his career.
Neeson had previously been known for Schindler’s List, Rob Roy, Michael Collins, and Star Wars Episode I. He was a serious dramatic actor with the bearing of an old-school leading man. The casting director realized that this bearing would translate to action material if the character were calibrated for older masculine authority instead of for younger physical theatrics. The realization was correct. Bryan Mills is a fifty-six-year-old man who can still execute professional violence because of training, discipline, and the patient experience of having done this work for decades.
Neeson plays the character as a competent professional instead of as a flashy action hero. The choice is the casting innovation.
The performance also benefits from Neeson’s natural physical presence. He stands six feet four inches tall. He moves with the bulk of a man whose physicality has settled into solid weight instead of into youthful agility. The combination of size and age produces a Bryan Mills who threatens through gravity instead of through quickness. The fight choreography respects the physical reality, and good, because nobody here pretends a six-foot-four man in his fifties moves like a gymnast. Bryan doesn’t perform balletic combat. Bryan delivers efficient violence designed to incapacitate or kill as quickly as available means allow.
The Action Choreography
Pierre Morel had been a cinematographer before he became a director. Taken was his second directorial credit. The action choreography follows the visual style established by Morel’s previous film District B13 and by Luc Besson’s broader production company EuropaCorp. The fights are fast, brutal, and efficient. The cinematography stays close to the action.
The cutting rhythm maintains spatial logic even when the cuts are fast. Audiences can follow what’s happening throughout each combat sequence.
The torture sequence with the Albanian named Marko is among the most quoted action sequences in modern cinema. Bryan has tracked the trafficking ring to a Paris building. He’s captured Marko, who was one of the kidnappers in the apartment. Bryan ties Marko to a chair, runs wires through his thighs, and connects the wires to the building’s electrical system. He asks questions.
Marko provides answers. Bryan walks away leaving Marko electrocuted in the chair as the wires remain connected. The sequence works with the clinical precision of professional interrogation.
The Marko scene is where the film shows me it won’t flinch, and I admire the nerve. Bryan asks his questions, gets his answers and walks out with the power still running, and nobody stops to let him feel bad about it. I’d have been annoyed if they had. Marko helped sell a teenage girl, and mercy for him would have been a lie the film had no reason to tell.
The construction site sequence and the auction sequence are similarly economical.
Bryan enters dangerous environments with specific tactical preparation. Bryan executes the necessary violence to retrieve information or to neutralize threats. Bryan exits before reinforcements can arrive. The pattern repeats across the runtime with variations specific to each location. The repetition is satisfying instead of monotonous because each variation generates new tactical specifics the previous sequences hadn’t deployed.
The Auction
The auction sequence is the structural climax of the second act. Bryan has tracked the trafficking ring’s distribution chain. The chain ends with private auctions of trafficked women to wealthy buyers in Paris.
Bryan infiltrates the auction by posing as a buyer. He sees his daughter being offered for sale to a Saudi businessman. Bryan attempts to intervene. The intervention triggers the climactic sequence in which Bryan must retrieve his daughter from a private yacht moored on the Seine.
The auction sequence is the moment the film acknowledges the actual subject matter that the rest of the runtime has been operating around. The film is about sex trafficking. The plot mechanics deliver violence and pursuit. The substance underneath the plot is the trade in trafficked women that Bryan has been disrupting throughout the runtime. The auction makes the substance visible.
The film doesn’t flinch from showing what’s being sold, and it doesn’t exploit the imagery beyond what the dramatic content requires.
The decision to handle trafficking as the subject matter was unusual for a 2008 action film. Most action films of the era used kidnapping plots without engaging with the wider industry the kidnapping would lead to. Taken made the wider industry the structural target of the pursuit. Bryan isn’t just rescuing his daughter. Bryan is destroying every level of the operation that produced her capture. The stakes are personal and systemic at once. It’s smarter writing than this film usually gets credit for.
The Pacing
The runtime is ninety-three minutes. Every minute does work. The opening establishes Bryan’s character through observation instead of through exposition. The audience sees him doing private security for a pop star, interacting with his retired CIA colleagues, and struggling to connect with his daughter. By fifteen minutes in, the characterization is complete.
The kidnapping happens at the twenty-eight-minute mark. The investigation phase runs until approximately the sixty-minute mark. The retrieval phase runs from the sixty-minute mark to the ninety-minute mark. The denouement runs three minutes. The structural distribution is precise. The film doesn’t waste runtime on subplots, character development for secondary figures, or romantic complications. Every minute serves the central pursuit.
I’d hand Taken’s structure to every studio executive in Hollywood. There’s no romance for Bryan and no sidekick with a backstory to slow him down. I get impatient with action films that stop for fifteen minutes so a secondary character can have a feelings scene, and Taken never once asks me to wait.
The pacing discipline is the central craft achievement of the film. Most action films inflate to two hours because the producers believe audiences want more for their money. Taken refused the inflation. The result is a film that maintains tension across its entire runtime without the pacing collapses that plague longer action productions.
Audiences who have watched the film multiple times often note that the film feels shorter on rewatch than the actual runtime suggests. The compression produces the perceptual effect.
For Writers
Taken shows the value of refusing to inflate a story beyond what the story requires. The film could have been padded to two hours with subplots, secondary characters, romantic complications, and additional set pieces. Pierre Morel and Luc Besson refused all of the padding. They identified what the story needed and delivered exactly that, no more. The result is a film that feels lean and propulsive in ways that longer action films can’t match. The lesson for writers is that brevity is a craft skill.
A novel that delivers what it needs in three hundred pages is stronger than a novel that delivers the same content stretched to five hundred pages.
The discipline to cut what doesn’t advance the central concern is the discipline that produces the cleanest work. Most writers don’t have this discipline. The work that does have it stands out by contrast.
The Albanians
The villains are Albanian human traffickers. The choice is specific. The Albanian trafficking networks operating in Western Europe in the early 2000s were real criminal organizations with documented histories. The film draws on actual law enforcement intelligence about how these networks worked. The Albanians in the film aren’t invented adversaries but real organizations whose specific methods the film accurately depicts.
The choice has been criticized for ethnic specificity. The film names a specific ethnic group as the antagonists. Some viewers have argued that this damages Albanian communities by association. The defense is that the network depicted in the film existed and that pretending the network didn’t exist wouldn’t honor the actual victims of the actual trafficking. The film treats the Albanian characters as criminals instead of as representatives of Albanian people generally. Bryan doesn’t target Albanians indiscriminately. Bryan targets the specific operation that took his daughter.
Other Albanian characters in the film aren’t implicated.
The casting of the Albanian roles is uniformly strong.
Arben Bajraktaraj as Marko delivers one of the more memorable secondary villain performances in the film. The actor brings physical menace and specific Albanian regional vocal characteristics that ground the character in the actual culture instead of in generic European villainy. The supporting Albanians similarly bring specific casting that raises the material above what generic villain performances would have produced.
The French Connection
Luc Besson’s French production company EuropaCorp produced the film.
Besson had built EuropaCorp into a hugely prolific European production operation of the 1990s and 2000s. The company specialized in efficient genre productions filmed in Paris and the surrounding regions. EuropaCorp’s house style emphasized action choreography, on-location realism, and tight runtimes. Taken is the company’s most successful production.
The Paris location work is genuine. The film was filmed in actual Paris streets, actual Paris buildings, and actual Paris suburbs.
The city becomes a character through the production’s commitment to physical location shooting. Bryan handles the actual geography of Paris. The chase sequences use actual streets. The Seine sequences use the actual river. The visual realism gives the film a look that studio productions can’t match.
The French police investigation handled by Inspector Jean-Claude Pitrel, played by Olivier Rabourdin, provides the procedural counterpoint to Bryan’s vigilante pursuit. Pitrel is a former CIA contact who has retired into French law enforcement. Bryan exploits the relationship to access investigative resources Bryan himself no longer has. The interaction also generates the film’s brief acknowledgment that Bryan’s methods aren’t acceptable in normal law enforcement contexts. Pitrel is sympathetic but can’t officially support what Bryan is doing. The conflict produces one of the film’s more interesting character relationships.
The Sequels Problem
Taken 2 arrived in 2012. Olivier Megaton directed instead of Morel. The film is set in Istanbul and follows the Albanian father of one of the men Bryan killed in the original as he seeks revenge. The sequel is competent action filmmaking, and it’s a letdown next to the original. The pacing is looser. The action choreography is less precise. The dramatic stakes are weaker because Bryan is now the established competent operative instead of the underestimated newcomer.
On a budget of forty-five million dollars, the film grossed three hundred seventy-six million dollars. The commercial success exceeded the original. The critical reception didn’t.
Taken 3 arrived in 2014. Olivier Megaton directed again. The film is set in Los Angeles and follows Bryan as he’s framed for the murder of his ex-wife Lenore. The third film abandons the human trafficking structure entirely and is a generic fugitive thriller. The film grossed three hundred twenty-six million dollars on a forty-eight million dollar budget. The commercial success again exceeded the actual quality of the work. The franchise had effectively run out of ideas by the third film.
The sequels bother me more than they should. Taken 3 took the one thing this franchise did better than anybody, a father tearing through a trafficking ring to get his kid back, and threw it away for a framed-man plot any studio could have made. Neeson deserved better, and so did Bryan Mills.
The television series Taken arrived in 2017. It follows a younger Bryan Mills as a CIA operative in the years before the events of the film. The series ran for two seasons and was canceled, and it isn’t necessary viewing. The film franchise is best treated as the original Taken plus two diminishing sequels and an unnecessary prequel television series. Audiences should watch the original and can safely ignore the remaining material.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Taken is the example case for action cinema that respects its audience by refusing to waste their time. Most action films pad their runtimes with subplots, romantic complications, secondary character development, and additional set pieces designed to justify the ticket price. Pierre Morel refused all of the padding. He identified the dramatic question, answered it efficiently, and ended the film when the answer was delivered. The result is ninety-three minutes of pure pursuit storytelling that maintains tension across every single minute. The choice required confidence.
Most producers would have demanded additional content. Luc Besson protected the production’s discipline because his EuropaCorp house style had taught him that compressed action delivers stronger response than inflated action. The lesson for writers is that the strongest version of any action story is usually shorter than the writer’s first instinct suggests. Cut the subplots. Cut the romantic complications. Cut the additional set pieces. Deliver the central story and end. Audiences will respond to compression in ways they won’t respond to inflation. Taken shows the principle at maximum strength.
Every action writer should study the film for its pacing discipline alone.
Is Taken worth watching?
A 10++++. Taken is the best pure action film of the twenty-first century. Pierre Morel directed it with the kind of precision that most action filmmakers spend entire careers attempting to achieve. Liam Neeson delivered the performance that transformed his career and created the late-career action genre that later productions have been mining for fifteen years. The Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen screenplay is one of the leanest action screenplays of the past two decades. The phone call dialogue is permanent vocabulary in popular culture.
The Paris location work grounds the film in actual geography. The pacing discipline produces ninety-three minutes of compressed propulsion that no later action film has matched at the same runtime.
Taken deserves every plus sign on that 10++++. The phone call, the Marko scene, the auction and the yacht all hold up because the film never wastes a second getting from one to the next, and a film that compressed has nowhere to go stale.
Nobody has made a leaner, meaner action film since, and I’ve stopped expecting anyone to. Skip the sequels. The original is the one I’d hand anybody who asks me what an action movie should be.
