Taken (film): Difference between revisions

[[File:taken-poster-new_3879.jpg|frame|You'd best listen.]]

 

'''Marko:''' ''[[Tempting Fate|Good]] [[Too Dumb to Live|luck]]''. }}

 

[[Papa Wolf|Hell hath no fury like a father protecting his little girl,]] as the underworld of Paris soon learns the '''hard''' and '''painful''' way. At times, this film is high comedy, albeit of an [[Darker and Edgier|extremely]] [[Pay Evil Unto Evil|sadistic]] kind.

 

 

{{tropelist}}

* [[Amicably Divorced]]: Not at the beginning of the film, mind you; but when Bryan single-handedly saved Kimmy's life he certainly reclaimed a measure of love from his ex-wife, not to mention gaining the friendship and respect of her husband.

* [[Anti-Hero]]: Bryan Mills, who is a [[Sliding Scale of Anti-Heroes|Type IV]].

* [[Authority Equals Asskicking]]: Sheik Raman's [[The Dragon|Dragon]] is probably the only person in the entire film to be on equal footing with Bryan in a fight... or the only person who lasts more than 30 seconds against him, anyway.

* [[Awesome Yet Practical]]: Bryan's martial arts style obeys the laws of gravity and physics, and involves no somersaults or fancy kicks—he even refuses to use [[Guns Akimbo]] when he has two pistols. His style basically consists of ramming hard things into people's heads, and ramming people's heads into hard things, and dammit, it works ''[[Ramming Always Works|really]]'' well.

** Even regular kicking is avoided, which is a surprising bit of [[Shown Their Work]] for Hollywood. Many martial arts experts agree that kicking is mostly ineffective in a [[Real Life]] fight.

* [[Badass Boast]]: The opening quote for this page. Too bad for the Albanians who thought he was bluffing.

** Also, when talking to his friend in the Parisian police:

* [[Badass Grandpa]]: Well, Badass Dad if you want to get technical. It's never specified how old Bryan is, but Liam Neeson is pushing 60, and Brian's age is mentioned to be a factor, but he can still waste a dozen villains half his age without breaking a sweat, and it's only near the very end of the movie that he starts visibly feeling the strain.

* [[Badass Longcoat]]: In some of the publicity shots and part of Bryan's outfit for much of the film.

* [[Bald of Evil]]

* [[Based on a Great Big Lie]]: One William Hillar, who was eventually revealed to be a fraud who never even served in the military, said that this happened to him in Asia. In his version, it was the friend who survived, not his daughter.

* [[Combat Pragmatist]]: Bryan is a ''god'' of this trope. Let's see: [[Groin Attack|aiming for the nuts]] 90% of the time, playing dead in a shoot-out, shooting someone in the back, shooting someone {{spoiler|who let their guard down for one microsecond just to talk, [[Boom! Headshot!|aiming for the head]] in a hostage standoff}}, the list goes on...

* [[Compensating for Something]]: When Bryan and Stewart are arguing, before Brian has revealed Kim has been kidnapped, and is asking Stewart questions about his business to determine if it had anything to do with Kim being kidnapped, Stewart starts playing the rich guy card, and Brian yells, "This is no time for dick measuring!"

* [[Completely Different Title]]: In Germany, the movie is known as ''96 Hours''...complete without translation in English, making finding this article exceptionally hard without the help of IMDB.

** And in Russia it's called "The Hostage" (Заложница).

** In Italy, it became "Io vi troverò" ("I will find you").

* [[Dirty Coward]]: The young "recruiter" guy, Peter.

* [[Disposable Woman]]: The whole plot revolves around this; the reason Kim exists is so that she can be kidnapped, giving her father an excuse to show what a [[Badass]] he is.

* [[Downer Ending]]: Subverted so you don't feel worried about the victims of the Albanian's trafficking of women. Bryan took out major figureheads along the way of finding Kim so it's fair to say the entire operation has suffered a heavy blow by the end of the film.

* [[The Dragon]]: The very last guy Bryan confronts on the boat before the Sheikh gives the former a good fight, inflicting nearly every single wound Bryan has by the time he saves Kim. {{spoiler|The guy still dies anyway.}}

* [[Enhance Button]]: One of the clues he follows is a memory card from his daughters broken cell phone. He finds a picture with a reflection of someone following them around. He doesn't zoom in much, but he is able to enhance it using a contrast & sharpen filter at a kiosk to get a good look at his face.

* [[Establishing Character Moment]]: The first half hour makes it very clear several things. 1) Bryan loves his daughter more than anything else. 2) Bryan is a stickler for details and does everything with a precise edge to it. 3) He has a past life of undisclosed international field work that leaves him one of the most lethal people on the planet. The rest of the movie is showing what happens when someone takes away the first point.

** Bryan comes off very similar to Sam Fisher in ''[[Splinter Cell]]: Conviction'', and the film was released in Ubisoft's native France in 2008, and the US in 2009. SCC came out the next year, and shares elements such as parts of the fighting style, and {{spoiler|the plot of a [[Papa Wolf]] seeking his daughter and happening upon a major criminal plot on the way.}}

* [[Foe-Tossing Charge]]: Essentially the entire movie.

* [[Generic Ethnic Crime Gang]]: The primary antagonists are from an Albanian organized crime ring.

* [[Hilarity Ensues]]: Marko twitching like a cockroach hit by a slipper when Bryan turns on the power. [[Complete Monster|What did that dumb rapist]] expect to happen when [[What an Idiot!|he spat at a man]] who has just [[Too Dumb to Live|slammed two long and rusty nails into his thighs attached to a fuse box?]]

** [[Crowning Moment of Funny|TWICE!!]]

* [[I'll Kill You!]]

* [[ISO Standard Urban Groceries]]: Bryan uses a bag as camouflage to get into the Paris apartment. Jean-Claude also carries home a baguette for dinner.

* [[It's Personal]]: "It was just business, [[Nothing Personal]]!" [[Pre-Mortem One-Liner|"It was all personal to me."]] * BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*

* [[I Will Find You]]: Bryan never says this to his daughter, and the search is on fast forward, but Bryan still tears Paris a new asshole in service of this trope.

* [[Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique]]: Oh, the [[Electric Torture]].

* [[Jittercam]]: Thankfully not to the extent of the ''Bourne'' movies, but yeah.

* [[Karmic Death]]: Possibly ''good'' luck for the [[Dirty Coward]], since as we see later, it prevented him from being [[Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique|'interrogated']].

* [[Killed Mid-Sentence]]: {{spoiler|"We can negoti--" [[Boom! Headshot!|*BANG*]]}}

* [[Knight Templar Parent]]: Even better when you consider that Liam Neeson's last major role before this film [[Kingdom of Heaven|was as a Crusader knight]].

* [[Le Cops Sportif]]

* [[The Man Behind the Curtain]]

* [[Murder Is the Best Solution]]: There's 50 mooks between you and your daughter, better get started.

* [[Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy]]: The actual abductors are lowlife thugs from the Albanian mafia, but as Bryan carves his way through Paris to find his daughter he discovers they are just part of a much wider and more sinister network existing at all levels of society, including the police and high-placed city officials, with clients including a wealthy Arab oil sheik.

** Then again, the former was just an average crazy stalker. The latter used special knives with tremendous skills.

** Also, {{spoiler|Saint-Clair when Bryan gets out of the trap in the mansion.}} As soon as they exchange looks, {{spoiler|Saint-Clair runs for his life. He dies.}}

* [[One-Man Army]]: The main character goes through an underground sex-trafficking crime ring the same way [[Resident Evil 4|Leon Kennedy]] [[Kill'Em All|goes through a Spanish peasant village.]]

** It's practically a meme these days to call this film "that movie where Liam Neeson kills half of Europe".

* [[One-Scene Wonder]]: The pop star Bryan saves in the beginning has a handful of lines in the beginning and a brief scene at the end, but her character is incredibly well developed in that short amount of time.

* [[Overprotective Dad]]: '''Heavily''' justified.

* [[Papa Wolf]]: All those other tropes on this page having "Trope Name: The Movie"? They're not. This movie is Papa Wolf: The Movie.

* [[Pay Evil Unto Evil]]: Bryan does this a lot. In fact, the film's general message is that sometimes it's ''necessary'' for [[The Hero]] to do bad things.

* [[Pop Cultural Osmosis Failure]]: Subverted.

* [[Properly Paranoid]]: The [[Overprotective Dad]] is proven ''absolutely right'' in every way to have tried forbidding his daughter from traveling overseas. As well, the conditions he sets when he finally allows her to go (regular phone calls and such) are the only reason they had any sort of chance of rescuing her.

** Liam Neeson has stated that the movie caused some cases of this in real life. People have come up to him and told him they will never send their kids to Europe, which he's not too happy about.

* [[Protagonist-Centered Morality]]: Bryan comes off this way as he initially appears to care only about his daughter and doesn't help any of the other victims.

** [[Your Mileage May Vary|Somewhat justified]], as he only has a 96 hour window to find his daughter and stopping to help the other girls would only cost him valuable time. It's also undermined by the fact during the course of the search, Bryan managed to kill off most of the figureheads behind the slaving ring, likely destroying the entire setup.

* [[Punch Clock Villain]]: Patrice tries to paint himself this way, but fails to convince Bryan.

* [[Reassigned to Antarctica]]: In the past, Bryan left a mission to attend Kim's birthday party and got reassigned to Alaska for his actions.

* [[Rich Bitch]]: Lenore, Bryan's ex-wife. She has good reason for not liking Bryan, mainly that he wasn't around due to his career taking out very bad people in the CIA, but she winds up looking spiteful and manipulative instead. She repeatedly tries to distance her daughter from Bryan (thankfully unsuccessful) and flaunt the fact that her new husband is richer and can afford nicer things for Kim. This invokes [[Disproportionate Retribution]] when you consider the fact that the woman yells at Bryan for trying to give his daughter a gift on her birthday (an [[Abusive Parent]] might deserve that treatment, not a guy who simply worked odd hours). And then children of divorce often play one against the other, so their daughter likely played off the tension to get more out of both of them.

** Pop star Sheerah initially seems like this when, upon being asked by Bryan if she can give his aspiring-to-be-singer daughter any tips, she responds, "Tell her to pick another career." It's later revealed after Bryan saves Sheerah from an attacker that she meant it as a warning, as a lucrative career in the music industry is "not what everyone thinks it is". She ends up giving the number of her vocal coach and her manager to Bryan when he simply responds, "That's what she wants."

* [[Scary Black Man]]: He appears ''just'' long enough to get his ass completely whupped by Bryan.

* [[Serious Business]]: Apparently, sex slaver Marko values keeping the location of our protagonist's daughter secret more than his own life. He's probably worried that his colleagues would do worse if they found out. [[Cold-Blooded Torture|Oooooh boy is he wrong.]]

* [[Shoot the Dog]]: {{spoiler|Shooting Jean Claude's innocent wife}}.

* [[Spiritual Successor]]: ABC's ''Missing'', starring Ashley Judd, is about a former CIA agent [[Mama Bear]] looking for her abducted son and stumbling onto some sort of larger plot. However, Becca Winstone has more backup and friends than Mills.

* [[Spoiled Sweet]]: Kimmy is certainly spoiled by her multi-millionare step-dad, but she doesn't short her real dad on some love and hugs at her birthday party (Her scream of joy at the step-dad's pony gift was louder, but she wasn't faking with the karaoke machine from Bryan). This is also in contrast to her Mom trying to trivialize his presence.

* [[Too Dumb to Live]]: Kim and Amanda, but mostly Amanda as Kim had reservations about all the information Amanda was sharing. Two young, pretty American women who don't speak much French go to Paris alone, they accept a car ride with a stranger, they let the stranger see the exact address where they are staying, they tell the stranger where in the building they will be staying and that they will be alone in the apartment. It's as though they went down a checklist of things not to do when traveling.

** The human traffickers organization runs on the premise that the best women are young girls with rich families that can send them on vacation who have the diplomatic clout to demand investigations. Better yet, they operate at a post 9/11 airport so that they can be recorded by security cameras talking to the girls at their last known location. Even if Bryan hadn't made his roaring rampage of rescue, the families would be demanding answers, the news media would be having a field day, and the French government would have shut the whole thing down within a week (maybe). Human trafficking only works when nobody cares enough about the victims.

* [[Tranquil Fury]]

* [[Try and Follow]]: Done semi-successfully by one of the [[Mooks]] Bryan tracks down.

* [[The Un-Reveal]]: It's never fully explained what Bryan used to do, his conversation with his buddies and former co-workers implies any combination of wet work, special forces or intelligence/counter intelligence work. Kimmy admitted she was afraid to ask what he did and all he explained was "a Preventer." A [[Professional Killer|"Preventer"]] of the type known in the movies to inhabit [[CIA|Langley, Virginia]] would seem to be a safe assumption.

* [[Unstoppable Rage]]

* [[What the Hell, Hero?]]: A mutual accusation between Bryan and Lenore regarding Kimmy's Paris trip. Lenore called him out for crushing her dream almost on the spot, while Bryan told her off for making it a double-team ordeal where he was the bad guy by default.

* [[Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?]]: The villains suffer from this. [[Dangerously Genre Savvy|Bryan doesn't.]]

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Films of the 2000s]]

[[Category:Taken]]

[[Category:Film]]