Taken [Revisited] (7.5/10)

With the supposed final movie out, I thought of revisiting the first Taken movie again.

Surprisingly, this movie still holds up today. But then again, it's only been 6 years, yet somehow it feels much longer.

Why this movie worked so well, to me, was largely because of two things. One, Pierre Morel's direction, especially in creating spectacular fight scenes that showed Liam Neeson as a badass, who really had "a particular set of skills" that was formidable and should be feared.

Neeson drove in the fear when he told a room full of thugs that he was the one on the phone who said that he would find them and kill them.

And this transpired so well with the intended effect because of the script created by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen - a script that was clever and entertaining and was never able to be duplicated again by the duo. It's as if they were never inspired that way again when it came to the franchise.

But not only the writing team, Neeson as well felt like he phoned it in in both the sequels when it came to performing. In that one scene when he was listening on the phone to his daughter, Maggie Grace, got taken by the thugs; you could see the acting there. But that kind of effort never again appeared.

I place the blame on Olivier Megaton though, the director responsible for the sequels. He never brought out the best of Neeson. And also was never able to replicate that kind of sleek action that made the first movie so memorable.