Taken

Laim Neeson looking dangerous.

Who doesn’t love a nice rom-com with this Northern Irish hunk? Those awkward moments, those amusing misunderstandings and… Did Liam Neeson just beat a man to death?

Yes. Yes he did.

2008’s Taken saw Liam Neeson play Bryan Mills, a retired secret service agent. Now, seeing him in this sort of role may be a little suprising, but after 10 minutes of watching this you’ll see why they chose him. Bryan’s daughter is kidnapped into the human trafficking trade by an Albanian gang and Neeson, with an accent like sweet wine poured over velvet, gets busy getting even.

This guy doesn’t take any shit. He kills anyone that had anything to do with his daughters disappearance in order to find her. He kills the guy that once catered a luncheon for the wife of one of the men that had a past legitimate business dealing with the cousin of the guy who runs the human trafficking ring. I just made that up, but it’s the sort of shit Neeson would do in this film because he is just such an unrestrained badass. He makes Bruce Campbell look like Bruce Springsteen.

We see some of the most awesome torture in this film, not in an over the top lets-see-how-many-people-we-can-make-sick kind of way that films such as ‘hostel’ used. No, in these scenes not only are you cheering Liam on, you are wearing a massive shit-eating grin like a fat kid with some candy. He single handedly kills like 50 people and, because they are Albanian, it doesn’t matter. That’s like killing half a normal person. Maybe a third. He also shoots a French policeman’s wife and then beats him up. Hilarious.

There have been similar films which were also pretty good, like Proof of Life, Ransom or Commando, but the moral of this story is that when your daughter is kidnapped by smelly immigrants there is only one man you would want to send after her. Liam Neeson. If negotiations, with that accent like being ear-tongued by a Japanese schoolgirl in fishnets and 6 inch pumps, don’t work then he can just kill his way through, because he is actually part robot.

This movie fucked me in the eyes for 94 minutes straight and if I whimpered it would slap me and tell me to ‘quit being such a little bitch’. If you haven’t seen this masterpiece yet I strongly recommend that you do. But it’s probably not a good idea to take the kids, but that’s ok, because I know of a nice Albanian man that would happily baby sit for you.