Taken (2008)

Posted May 23, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Former secret agent Bryan Mills is trying to make up for the time he lost with his daughter by resigning from the service and spending as much time as possible with her. Unfortunately, his action comes a bit late and his wife has divorced him to marry another man while the contact with his daughter Kim is limited to her birthdays. Shortly after her 17th birthday, Kim asks her father permission to go on a trip to France together with some friends to visit museums and although Bryan isn’t all too happy with it he agrees.

Little after Kim and her girlfriend Amanda arrive in Paris they get approached by a seemingly friendly guy called Peter who invites them to share a taxi. When little later they’re at the appartment of Amanda’s cousins and Kim calls Bryan, masked men enter and drag Amanda away. While still on the phone with Bryan, Kim tells him what’s going on and Bryan understands that it’s an abduction. He reassures Kim that he’ll be coming for her and that she doesn’t have to be scared. After the kidnappers take Kim as well, Bryan immediately flies over to Paris where he finds out that Kim and Amanda have been taken by Albanian gangsters who use the women for prostitutian and that after 96 hours the chances of finding anyone back is zero.

Sound and Vision:
This blu-ray disc got a very good treatment which results in very sharp images and action that can easily be followed during the many dark scenes. Compression errors are completely absent and we can only give a heads up to Warner for delivering such a good product.

There’s three soundtracks that are of very good quality. Preference goes to the TrueHD 5.1 track which makes best use of the surround channels as well as the subwoofer. Throughout the movie these are used for effects and environment sounds as well as some music. Good stuff!

Extras:
We only get a short and standard Making Of which is not really what you would expect from a Blu-ray release.

Conclusion:
Taken is a hard and violent action movie with surprisingly Liam Neesom in the main lead. You wouldn’t expect him as a bad-ass former secret agent who would stop at nothing to get his daughter back but it’s probably due to this that the concept actually looks quite realistic and works nicely. Neesom does an excellent job and the rest of the cast is good for supportive roles but it’s clear that all the focus is towards Neesom. I think that if we would have gotten a standard action hero like Vin Diesel in the lead, Taken would have lost a lot of its hard realism and would end up in the pile of mediocre action flicks. Luckily this isn’t the case.

As Blu-ray release we get excellent image and sound but on the extras Warner dropped the ball. If you’re looking for some splendid action that goes at high pace and keeps you at the tip of your seat from beginning until end, then you can’t go wrong with Taken

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