I watched Taken in the cinema yesterday, and it was every bit as exciting as the reviews said it would be.
The plot is familiar, an action film cliché, but it was great nevertheless, if you’re one of those people who know how to employ suspension of disbelief. Fast-paced and action-packed, it kept my heart pumping from start to finish.
The story is about Bryan, a retired CIA “preventer” (someone who prevents bad things from happening, as he explains in the movie) who has moved near his daughter Kim, who lives with her mother and stepfather, so that he could spend more time with her.
When Kim goes to Paris with her friend Amanda, they both fall prey to a syndicate that kidnaps foreign women and enter them into their prostitution business.
Kim is on the phone with her dad when she gets dragged off, however, and he has time to record her captors’ voices as well as talk to one of them, saying: “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”
And he spends the rest of the movie doing just that.
I found myself relishing his every kill because it’s not just business, but as he said, “it’s all personal to me.”
Of course it ends happy, with him successfully rescuing his daughter, otherwise I would not have liked the movie no matter how great it was. 😀
How I wish that in real life, stories like his also ended happily. Sadly, the movie’s plot is based on truth; that is, there are real syndicates who kidnap real poor unsuspecting women and push them into the revolting world of prostitution. These women also have real parents who, like the character Bryan, also go to tremendous lengths to get their daughters back.
But the similarity ends there, because in the real world, these parents are not ex CIA agents who have the skills to get their kids back home safe and sound.
Sometime last year, I read an article in the Reader’s Digest about a woman who has been searching for her daughter for years now and still hasn’t found her. She has been written up on CNN as well:
When Susana Trimarco’s daughter Marita Veron was 23, she vanished from their hometown in Argentina, a suspected victim of a human trafficking and prostitution ring with links throughout Latin America and Europe.
Trimarco, 54, has spent the past 6½ years searching for her daughter, often putting herself at risk. While chasing down leads on Marita’s whereabouts, she’s entered dark and dangerous brothels and confronted pimps and politicians who, she says, are complicit in her daughter’s disappearance.
She has won accolades throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States for her work. But Marita is nowhere to be found.
I feel so sad for her. How I wish the movies were more like real life!
As for me, I would definitely be wary of strangers after this. “Don’t talk to strangers” – a parental rule that definitely has a point!