Taken vs Babylon A.D.

We all know I’m a cynic. But even my jaw dropped at Taken. It’s lazy, convoluted, cold, and here’s hoping, the most deeply cynical movie I’ll see in 2009.

Maggie Grace plays Kim, a seventeen year old who looks twenty-five and acts twelve. She’s all giggly and naïve and lives with her mother and stepfather on an estate so palatial it belongs on Naboo. Maggie has hundreds of guests for her birthday party (sweet…seventeen?) and gets a huge horse as a gift. Not just a pony, but like, Secretariat’s nephew or something. She’s all “Horseys! Squee!” Her father is there as well, sad that his puny gift didn’t measure up. He’s out of touch, see, because all he has to give her is love and protection. He’s a former CIA agent, but lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with no decorations save a photo album with one picture of Maggie on each page. Maggie really wants to be a pop star when she grows up, and she’s saving her virginity for that special someone. She sneaks off to Paris with her slutty friend (they’re going to follow U2 around Europe. I’m not saying teens these days don’t like U2…but that much?) If you’ve seen the trailer, you know she gets kidnapped by sleazy foreigners, and that her dad, a recently-retired CIA operative, tells her—even though she’s across the house and looks like she can get away—to hide under the bed. And then he tells her she’s going to be taken. Uh…why? Oh, so the movie can happen.

So, Brian, played by Liam Neeson (who has never had a role this underwritten), goes to Paris and kills the entire city to find his daughter and spare her virginity (the script makes a point of stressing that she’s a virgin. Her friend is not, and dies a couple scenes later, I’m just saying.) Neeson is in great shape, and is a capable movie fighter, as we should have already known from Rob Roy, Batman Begins and The Phantom Menace. But the things he does here are so outlandish as to be laughable. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980s killed with more hesitation. Even Steven Seagal gets in a one-liner before he snaps your neck. Neeson just kills, kills, kills. At one point, he breaks a guy’s ribs one at a time. What other CIA skills does he have at his disposal? Well, he can convincingly impersonate a crooked French cop without hiding his Irish accent, he can drive over, through or around anything, and he can find a bad guy just by knowing his first name. In a pivotal scene, Brian calls a friend’s bluff by shooting his wife in the arm. And that’s his friend. Imagine what he does to his enemies. It’s fun, I suppose, but completely out of character from the Brian we met at the movie’s beginning, being meek at the party, hanging with his friends and guarding the pop star.

Ugh. The pop star. Don’t remind me.

Early in Taken, Brian gets a freelance job as a bodyguard for a pop star, played by an actress who looks nothing like a pop star. She has a scene warming up her instrument or whatever. It takes her five seconds, and she’s terrible, but she’s all Ed Wood about it, ready to kick ass and put on the show of a lifetime. Of course someone’s back stage ready to stab her (no, it wasn’t me), and Brian saves the day. Pop Star is touched, and offers to help Maggie with her career. But I digress.

Are you catching the plot points so far? Here’s what we have: spoiled rich girl gets whatever she wants for her birthday, including fame, is a virgin, goes to Paris, meets a cute boy who tries to hurt her. And then, of course, Daddy to the rescue! Doesn’t this sound like it was written by a girl of roughly eleven years old? You should see the costume Maggie Grace has on near the end of the film; it’s about two degrees away from Disney Princess Jasmine.

Throughout Taken, Neeson’s Brian seems gifted with otherworldly abilities. He never makes a mistake, never appears to be close to losing a fight or not finding his daughter. Every hunch he has pays off, every punch hits its target. He’s like Jack Bauer, if Jack Bauer could teleport and see through walls. Even in Commando, Schwarzenegger needed Ray Dawn Chong to drive the car while he shot rockets out the backseat. Even the newest Rambo was humanized to a tiny degree. But in Taken, Neeson needs no one, answers to no one, and, for this viewer at least, earned no sympathy for his trouble. Hey, it’s sad his daughter was kidnapped, but from the looks of things, Brian leaves a lot of innocent girls to die during his search (and in one poorly-filmed sequence in a construction site, might have killed a few himself). If he’d had one moment as an underdog, just one little Die Hard scene with a cut foot, I might have warmed to the idea of one man taking on the human trafficking industry with his fists. Instead, I sat there with my smartass friends, laughing unintentionally at every leap of logic taken by Taken.

If Taken had a lesser actor, I might cut it more slack. If it did indeed star Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980s, then we would know ahead of time to focus on its other charms (although I’m at a loss for what Taken’s charms might be. It doesn’t look particularly good, and none of the action is filmed in any way approaching original). Take Babylon A.D. for example. It stars Vin Diesel, so automatically, I’m able to put my brain into a different mode (and turn the bass off on my speakers). It was directed by someone who took his name off the film, so then and there, I know that no matter how self-important or badass the trailer might be (cough, like the trailer for Taken), then the film itself might be a mess. And we can move on from there. Hey, don’t blindfold me and take me to McDonalds. Just tell me we’re going to McDonalds, and I’ll figure out what I want by the time we get there.

Babylon A.D. is derivative as hell. It’s got traces of Children of Men, Blade Runner, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The Fifth Element, and most of Diesel’s previous movies (this isn’t a sequel, but you’ve got your work cut out for you to prove definitely otherwise.). Vin Diesel plays a gun-for-hire living in a future version of Kazakhstan. He’s given the assignment of taking a mysterious girl to New York. She’s a virgin (in Babylon A.D., it’s actually integral to the character and the plot, imagine that), and she’s got considerable mental capabilities (a problem Maggie Grace’s character in Taken does not have.). Diesel’s joined on his mission by Michelle Yeoh as some kind of Kung Fu nun. You heard me. There are massive set pieces in underground fight clubs, out in the snow, in post-apocalyptic cities, and in nothing resembling anything so much as other, better movies. Charlotte Rampling is on hand to class things up, much as Judi Dench did in The Chronicles of Riddick. It’s Vin Diesel’s show though, and cheesy as it is, I forgave him before the movie even got rolling. There’s just something about that guy. I mean, what an underdog: sometimes he has to punch you twice before it kills you.

Taken: D

Babylon A.D.: C