Tuesday 23 September 2008

Taken Review

Damn it must be hard work being a parent. As the child grows they're bound to resent you. If you stay away working for their upbringing they'll hate you for it. If you divorce there's the danger of them favouring their new rich father. They might even become U2 fans. They might want to leave the safety of the good ol' USA and go to Europe. And then, then they will definitely get kidnapped by sex traffickers and face drug addiction and death. Definitely.

I think it best to let Liam Neeson's pissed off Daddy Bryan explain what will happen if you snatch his 17-year old daughter. Thanks to a fair few years in the field of torturing foreigners he has, "...a very particular set of skills. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." Damn skippy he will.

The first twenty minutes feature a piss-yer-pants funny overly paranoid Liam telling his daughter not to go to Paris. Evil, evil, Paris. And when this brillaintly surreal premise that if you leave America you will get fucked, gets ino full swing the movie becomes one of the best/worst most enjoyable/most offensively ignorant fims of the year. No wonder 80% of Americans don't have passports. Justified xenophobia with lines such as "My job made me aware!" are delivered with such tongue removed from mouth that you'll either scream with laughter or scream with disgust.

Me, I was well on the side of laughter. Every time Holly Valance's singer turns up the film goes up a notch on the ludicrous-ometer. Thats either because the idea of someone wanted to assassinate her is ridiculous or her reappearance at the end in the 'look everything is okay after all' ending is so far removed from reality it might as well have UFO's flying out of her butt. The fact that sex trafficking is the theme of the film makes the laughter dy up occasionally but its not long before Johnny foreigner is being dealt a healthy dose of justice American style by Bryan. Featuring the worst kind of 'don't you dare leave the country' sensationalism Taken is a terrible, terrible movie that I implore you to watch.

4 comments:

SMR said...

Maybe you can answer this for me. Why does this review:
http://www.odeon.co.uk/fanatic/film_info/m11297/Taken/

refer to Liam Neesen [sic] as Kinsey? Does he reprise his role as the sex interested psycho-analyst?

Whoever wrote that review needs to be shot. In the street, preferably. With a bag over their head to reduce the clean-up operation.
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owen said...

Well I thought it might be his surname but its not its Mills. So yes, a shooting is in order.

I'd like Odeon.co.uk to use my revews but apperently i make too many masturbation jokes. And Paul Gadd jokes. And cuss words.

owen said...

Yes I spelt apparently wrong there. Really wrong.
O
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SMR said...

That's something I keep meaning to say - do you use a spell check? has your copy of Word done that weird thing that mine has, and adopted Welsh as it's national language, rendering the spell check obselete?

I'd be happy to spell check if you're bothered. But really, most of the bloopers could be fixed by paying attention to the wiggly red lines.

Don't go to Odeon - you could find out who the reviewer is and send them your versions of reviews anonymously until they break down and cry, begging for it to stop. Or you could blow up their car/house/dog.

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