TAKEN

Seventeen year-old Kim is the pride and joy of her father Bryan Mills. Bryan is a retired agent who left the Central Intelligence Agency to be near Kim in California. Kim lives with her mother Lenore and her wealthy stepfather Stuart. Kim manages to convince her reluctant father to allow her to travel to Paris with her friend Amanda. When the girls arrive in Paris they share a cab with a stranger named Peter, and Amanda lets it slip that they are alone in Paris. Using this information an Albanian gang of human traffickers kidnaps the girls. Kim barely has time to call her father and give him information. Her father gets to speak briefly to one of the kidnappers and he promises to kill the kidnappers if they do not let his daughter go free. The kidnapper wishes him "good luck," so Bryan Mills travels to Paris to search for his daughter and her friend.

The movie received generally negative reviews from professional critics; it stands at 58 percent ("rotten") on the Rotten Tomatoes index. Time Magazine's Richard Corliss said the movie "has nothing more on its mind than dozens of bad guys getting beat up and another one turned into instant roadkill." Dan Kois of the Washington Post described the film as "a satisfying thriller as grimly professional as its efficient hero" and likens the action to the Bourne series. Derek Elley of Variety described the film as a "kick ass, pedal-to-the-metal actioner." He added, "Besson alum Pierre Morel ... wisely doesn't give the viewer any time to ponder the string of unlikely coincidences in the script by Besson and regular scribe Robert Mark Kamen. From the actual kidnapping — breathlessly staged with Kim actually on the phone with dad — to Bryan arriving in Paris and immediately causing a pileup outside the airport, the film has the forward, devil-may-care momentum of a Bond movie on steroids." He went on to say, the "widescreen package is technically slick at all levels, and ditto the action choreography, in a cartoonish way. Kenneth Turan, of The Los Angeles Times, described the premise of Taken as "a brisk and violent action programmer that can't help being unintentionally silly at times... Obviously, Taken is not the kind of action film to spend much time worrying about its pedestrian script or largely indifferent acting, so it's fortunate to have Neeson in the starring role." He characterized Bryan Mills as "a relentless attack machine who is impervious to fists, bullets and fast-moving cars, he uses a variety of martial skills to knock out more opponents than Mike Tyson.