Vacation In Reviews

To begin with, my vacation was exhausting. Two teenage girls are very difficult to keep up with and are a whole lot of drama. But I love Megan and I'm glad she came to visit. I spent most of the vacation eating, shopping and driving around but I did manage to see one movie.

Taken - Liam Neeson is a former black-ops-type who definitely worked for the government but what part and doing what exactly they are pretty vague about. What they make clear is that it was important, dangerous and kept him away from his wife and daughter a lot and he was very good at it. So his daughter is a teenager now (though she behaves like she's 11 so it's possible there are some developmental problems that they didn't have time to address in the finished film) and Liam has retired in order to try to build a closer relationship with his her, but his now-ex-wife is remarried to a super rich guy and is prone to giving the daughter any ol' thing she wants. Including an unsupervised trip all around Europe with her trampy friend for a summer. But as they arrive in Paris, they're immediately targeted by a totally skeevy guy who arranges for them to be abducted and sold into sex slavery. No, I'm not kidding.

As it happens the daughter is on the phone with her over-protective dad when the abduction takes place so he's given enough clues to kick off his search. Eventually he kills 1/2 the population of France, finds the daughter's friend dead of a drug over dose and chained to a bed in a flop house, and then locates his daughter who is the top item at a "buy a virgin" auction. There is a car chase through the streets of Paris and a big scuffle on a boat and then the daughter is rescued.

There is also a thing with a pop star but the less said about that, the better.

The movie is fun to watch, it's fast-paced and fairly riveting and you're certainly with Neeson as his character shoots, pummels, electrocutes and decapitates his way through the seedy underworld of forced prostitution and human trafficking, but if you put too much thought into the story, you probably won't enjoy it nearly as much. Neeson is a major bad-ass though and as a bonus (SPOILER!), someone gets hit by a bus. I LOVE that!