Taken 2 movie in spanish11/9/2022 ![]() What’s really striking about rewatching Taken now, is the fact that it’s not so much a movie about an ex-CIA agent murdering most of Europe (though it is that), or a middle-age man reasserting his endangered virility (though it is that too), but a movie about a father fighting desperately to preserve his daughter’s chastity. How’s Mills supposed to compete with that? Well, it’s easy - once his daughter is taken, his particular skills lead him to Europe to save her from a gang of swarthy Albanian sex traffickers, all of whom Mills subsequently dispatches with brutal and inventive élan. Kids! At the film’s beginning, Mills is not only estranged from his 17-year-old daughter, Kim, he’s so comically emasculated that when he shows up at her birthday party with the present of a cherished karaoke machine, he’s instantly one-upped by his ex-wife’s sneering new hubby, Sir Winston Von Fatwallet (note: fact-check that name), who trots out his present, which is, of course, a horse. Like Die Hard, Taken’s best virtue - besides, of course, the phone call - is its elegant simplicity: Liam Neeson stars as Bryan Mills, a man with a very particular set of skills, acquired over a very long career, which makes him a nightmare for people like you, assuming “you” are faceless Albanian gangsters who kidnap his teenage daughter about five minutes after she lands in Paris on a trip her father specifically warned her was too unsafe to undertake. 4 from Bill Simmons’s invaluable article, “The Action Hero Championship Belt,” which states: “You can’t win the Action Hero Belt by shamelessly ripping off the movie that won the current champ his belt.” The same principle should apply to the movies themselves. It seems inappropriate, and even foolhardy, not to rank the film that started the trend as the best example of said trend here I invoke Rule No. So which of these Taken knockoffs is actually worth your time? Here, an entirely subjective attempt to definitively rank the Taken clones. Neeson himself has become a one-man genre, making two more Taken films and four more Taken-ish films since Taken’s release just seven years ago. Just as in the ‘00s, every quality actress of a certain age found new life as the lead in a premium cable series about a troubled and complicated woman ( Weeds, Damages, Nurse Jackie, The Big C, The Closer, Saving Grace, United States of Tara), now every quality male actor of a certain age seems poised to star in a mid-budget action film about a grizzled covert operative who’s pushed beyond the edge and decides to kill a bunch of Europeans. But unlike the Die-Hard-in-a-Blank subgenre, Taken clones are not identified primarily by their plot instead, the telltale element is the pedigree of the film’s star - whether it’s Liam Neeson, Denzel Washington, Mel Gibson, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Costner, or newly added to the list with this week’s The Gunman, the Oscar-winning Mr. There are, of course, slight variations on these factors, but usually most of them are accounted for. So what makes a Taken clone? In these films, an aging male superstar plays a world-weary former covert operative with a particular set of skills who’s pushed back into his former life by a child/spouse/dog being threatened/abducted/killed, at which point he systematically hunts down and imaginatively kills a bunch of tattooed Russians/Albanians/vaguely Slavic-seeming gangsters. ![]() Taken, however, was a huge, surprise hit, grossing roughly $150 million domestically, and soon, just like Die Hard before it, Taken had launched an action subgenre all its own. ![]() Neeson was not a stranger to popcorn movies - he’d appeared in the Star Wars prequels and Batman Begins - but the former Oskar Schindler hardly seemed like anyone’s obvious heir to Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or Van Damme. The most noteworthy thing about it was its surprising star: Liam Neeson, he of the brooding mien, baritone brogue, and impressively varied acting résumé. When Taken was released in 2008, it looked at first glance like a modestly budgeted, cleverly high concept, essentially throwaway thriller. ![]()
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