Taken
5 Movies Like John Wick
On the same note of a good man with a complicated past pushed to the brink, here comes Taken, a film that can be summarized as ‘Liam Neeson’s daughter gets kidnapped while on holiday in Paris, so he kills half of France’. We’ve never met Liam Neeson, but something about the idea of getting on his bad side makes us think that perhaps we never want to.
Taken toes the line between revenge flick and mystery drama extraordinarily well, never feeling ham-handed in either regard. The severity of his situation seems insurmountable, but Neeson’s character, retired CIA field agent Bryan Mills, handles it with a calmness that assures you that everything is going to be okay. Taken is a little bit more conservative with its violence, but still provides a healthy dose of action that keeps things moving at a thrilling pace.
The sequels are more or less watchable, if you’re so inclined, though the second movie never strays far from its predecessor’s shadow, like a nervous child instructed to ‘stay close to daddy’. Taken 3 is bolder in its approach, but it comes at the cost of the efforts made by Mills up to that point. It’s not Alien 3 levels of offensive rerouting, but it sets a sour tone for the rest of the film.
