Taken

If you like your movies to be plausible, you probably won't really like "Taken". If you're willing to completely suspend disbelief though, it's not too bad.

Liam Neeson plays a retired CIA guy who quit his job to spend more time with his 17 year old daughter, now semi-estranged from him, living with her mother and rich step-dad. Right from the start Liam seems to care just a little bit too much about his daughter - he gate crashes her 17th birthday party, takes a photo of them together, then goes directly to a drug store to get the photo developed and put in an album. Yeah a bit too full on if you ask me.

Anyway, she wants to go to Paris with a friend for a few months, and needs him to sign some paperwork because she's under 18. He doesn't want her to go, because he thinks it's too dangerous, but eventually agrees. Turns out he was right, she gets abducted the first night she's there, and he flies over to track her down before she disappears forever, and get revenge on the guys who took her.

After speaking to some CIA friends, he's told if he doesn't find her in the first 96 hours, he won't find her at all (and she'll be sold as a prostitute). So everything needs to go right for him, and it does, which is where the implausability comes in. He finds the young guy who helped abduct the girls within about an hour of arriving in Paris. He found his daughter's friend after bugging a random pimp, and overhearing him talk about a "construction site" (luckily he picked the right one). Other stretches include Liam outrunning an Audi, Liam defeating six or seven armed guys at once in hand to hand combat (this happens quite a bit), Liam recognising one of his daughter's captors by remembering his voice from a two word telephone conversation etc.

Anyway, somehow he manages to escape corrupt cops, and kill about a hundred gangsters and rescue his daughter, before escaping the country on a commercial flight.

It's shot well, although some of the fight scenes are shot really close up which makes them hard to follow. If you want a really good movie about revenge I'd recommend "Man On Fire" with Denzel, but this isn't too bad, as long as you don't expect too much.