Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Taken (2008)

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Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 08-15-2008, 12:33 AM:

90 minutes or so of a good action flick. Get some popcorn and go along for the ride.

Liam Neeson does a great job in the revenge stakes. You know what's going to happen most of the time but that doesn't matter.

4/5

Posted by Jennifer Pan (Member # 2035) on 08-19-2008, 02:44 AM:

Neeson kicks butt in this. I didn't know what to expect going into it but I was pleasantly surprised. [Smile]

Nice action scenes but sorta slow in the beginning. Its as if Jason Bourne got old and had a teenage daughter, lite. [Big Grin]

out of 5

Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 08-19-2008, 06:57 AM:

Bourne lite...that's good.

I was wondering why I hadn't seen any other reviews here and just found out it doesn't open until September in the USA.

Look forward to it guys. [thumbsup]

Posted by Demetris Thoupis (Member # 833) on 08-19-2008, 10:09 AM:

I actually saw it in April in Belgium !! [Eek!]

Liked it a lot
Good action movie to pass 2 or something hours

Posted by Sally Ann Burgess (Member # 4746) on 09-05-2008, 03:48 AM:

I really really enjoyed this...almost like watching Jason Bourne's older and slightly sexier brother! Even the music sounded the same in parts.
Short and full of action, does exactly what it says on the tin. 9/10.
Watching Wall-E tomorrow for the first time. Can't wait.

Posted by Tyler Potts (Member # 4952) on 10-17-2008, 02:25 PM:

Pushed back to January here in the states, managed to get a copy of it last night (started looking when I saw the trailer on Body of Lies). Really enjoyed it!

Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 02-23-2009, 06:45 PM:

quote: Steve Wilson
Sorry John, I was refering the posting on this board and not the world wide web.

quote: Me
Actually, so was I.

See?

Posted by Steve Wilson (Member # 2411) on 02-23-2009, 09:55 PM:

Well, No wonder I could not find the thing. I looked hard for it, but failed to understand just how far out of date the original post is!

Sorry John, I was refering the posting on this board and not the world wide web. Taken is a Mans Movie and I thought someone would have posted on the quality of the movie.

It appears that the critics did not like it that well, but regular folks that went to see it gave it a good vote. Its one of those movies that the critics may have killed by themselves.

I liked the movie a good bit. Action was good and the photography was just as good as any. I am like Louis Belloisy, I have been a photographer for over 25 years. I know good work when I see it!

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-18-2009, 11:54 AM:

We are playing this now.

I was expecting a lot from this film, because it has such enduring popularity that it just HAD to be good. And I like Liam Neeson too - he's always in quality projects - so I was ready to be greatly entertained. Not to be, though...I was severely disappointed.

Everything from the basics on up is stupid: Not only is the "mom" character completely opposite of what a real mom would be, the movie doesn't even work as a thrill ride, because the whole second half is so completely preposterous that you can never get "invested" in the characters.

Liam Neeson is able to find one guy at the Paris airport just from looking at a blurry cell phone picture of a reflection in a window?? Come on. He only needs to hear a couple of words (or garbled phrases) from some dude, and from that he manages to figure out where a building is, in a city where the streets might run for miles? He kills a couple of dozen people, steals a couple of cars, destroys several buildings and STILL manages to fly home right after plucking his daughter out of the bad guy's hands without so much as a few days in prison while waiting to clear his name? Not to mention all of this happens in Paris without a single law enforcement persen ever showing up?

This movie takes all of those idiocies and then piles on every standard action-movie cliche in the book, such as:

- The bad guys can fire all the automatic weapon shots they want but will never hit the good guy, while the good guy only needs one shot (or stab) from a gun (or knife) to vanquish any bad guy.

- The bad guys will obligingly take turns and attack the good guy one at a time, giving him a chance to dispatch each of them before moving on to the next.

- And finally, a demonstration of the time-honored trick of touching any two random wires under the dash of a car together to hot-wire it. I need to try that the next time I forget my keys.

They could have improved this movie by having Neeson shoot his ex-wife at the airport when he gets home.

I will say that I liked the sound mix, and the plot was great until just after the original bad guy got killed (I was willing to forgive the unlikely cell-phone-picture-recognition thing), so on that basis, it gets two out of five stars from me.

Posted by Jon P. Inghram (Member # 4125) on 04-18-2009, 02:08 PM:

I just remembered something I noticed while watching this: In the night scenes that were lit with the "natural" sodium vapor lamps they had to do some pretty extreme adjustments to the white balance of the image, cranking the blue up far enough that there was a noticeable amount of noise in the shadows in the blue channel. The odd thing was that the noise had a obvious grid pattern, it wasn't just random. It was being projected on 35mm so it wasn't the projector.

Posted by Jonathan M. Crist (Member # 413) on 04-18-2009, 03:41 PM:

What this picture really is a good second feature for the drive-ins. Short, keeps moving, and if you fall asleep and miss a few minutes it doesn't really matter.

2 stars out of 5