Pierre Morel | 93 mins | Blu-ray | 18
“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.”
So goes Liam Neeson’s famous (ish) mission statement in the latest (ish) action-thriller from the team behind The Transporter series. You need know little more of the plot, though it still takes half an hour to get to that little speech.
If you do want to know more of the plot… well, remember Man On Fire? The Tony Scott/Denzel Washington one (I presume the older one’s the same, but I’ve not seen it). Well, replace Washington with Neeson and Dakota Fanning’s character with “his daughter” and you’ve more or less got it. Taken is practically a remake, only in Europe, with a happier ending, and an hour shorter. It’s also not as good, but that’s a different matter.
You may be wondering why it takes a half-hour to get to that mission statement. Well, Man On Fire style, it’s because we’re treated to a significant chunk of character-based drama before the kidnapping occurs. This stuff at the beginning is either Character Deepening and Motivation Revealing or just dull and needless, depending on your point of view. And while I’m all for character and motivation and all the other stuff that actually makes
A Good Script rather than A Series Of Scenes, I’m inclined towards the latter here, because of the comparison with Man On Fire.
The Scott film showed us a character (this would be Washington) who’d shut down emotionally, who had nothing to care about. He meets a girl who he has to protect; that’s his job. But she brings him out of his shell, gives him a reason to live, to genuinely care about her rather than as a means to a pay-packet. And then she’s taken and he hunts those SOBs down. This is character building. In Taken, we’re shown an ex-CIA-or-something dad who loves his daughter. We spend half an hour being shown this. Then she’s taken and he goes after those SOBs.
See the difference? Washington has to go from point A to point C via point B before he’s ready to go on his killing spree/rescue mission. Neeson goes from point A to point A. Establishing he’s an ex-CIA-or-something dad who loves his daughter would take five minutes — indeed, it does, there’s just Some Other Stuff too — but the action portion of the film lasts less than an hour, so something needs to make it feature length, right? There’s nothing wrong with the early dramatic scenes in themselves — Neeson is an excellent actor, he could work this material in his sleep — but they’re needless for the real story.
So what of the real story? Well, at times it feels like someone filmed a treatment — once underway it’s all plot, action and not much else. Characters arrive only to be quickly dispatched, either because their purpose is served — the Albanian translator, for example — or in a body bag — which is nearly everyone else. In many ways it has an admirable efficiency — the plot is an action delivery system, not a proper story — 
but after half an hour spent setting things up, it’s like screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen felt they’d done their dramatic dues and just wanted to watch people get beaten up. Or shot. Or blown up. Or hit by trucks.
The action sequences are quite good. The thing is, Neeson’s an Actor, not a martial arts expert or glorified stuntman. He beats people up fine, he shoots a gun fine, he drives a car fine, but he can’t show the physical dexterity of Jason Statham in The Transporter, never mind Jackie Chan/Jet Li/insert Eastern star of preference here. The fights entertain while they last in the way any above-competent action movie is, but there’s nothing distinctive about any of them to raise them to a level where they’ll be remembered. And that’s pretty much fine, just not special.
Not to criticise director Pierre Morel, though. Largely pointless though they may be, there’s nothing wrong with his handling of the earlier scenes, and the same goes for the later ones. Visually he gives the film a slickness and sheen that seems to lift it slightly above Besson-and-co’s other recent Euro-American action/thrillers. Or that might just be because it’s the first I’ve watched on Blu-ray. (Incidentally, is it me or are the subtitles ineffective on the UK disc? None of the French or Arabic was subbed — and it seems it’s meant to be, because the English HOH track has it so. I was reduced to flicking that on and off every time someone spoke Foreign, which is A Pain. And rarely worth it. The special features seem to suffer a similar defect too.)
Despite all this, Taken’s an entertaining actioner. Unsurprisingly, there’s something satisfying about an apparently calm and controlled father being allowed to explode in precision violence against a bunch of scumbag white slavers. It’s wish fulfilment; proper justice finally being done. And, for extra gratification, he’s got the requisite spy skills — the bit with the radio and walkie-talkie, for example — and, even better, edge — perhaps the film’s most memorable moment (after that speech, anyway), when he shows the lengths he’ll go to when visiting a ‘friend’ for dinner.
If you think about it too much post-viewing, Taken begins to fall apart. Quickly. But for nearly 90 minutes while Liam Neeson shows those Evil Eastern Europeans who’s boss, it’s action-packed wish-fulfilment of the morally satisfying variety. Either that or bile-filled hate-driven xenophobic venom. Each to their own.
Seraphim Falls sees Liam Neeson and a crew of hired hands chase Pierce Brosnan across every Old West landscape imaginable — from snow-topped mountains to bone-dry dustbowl — but why?
once most everyone else has fallen by the wayside. As the only constants, the various situations and their reactions allow the men to be slowly revealed. It’s not really a character piece, but they’re at least more complicated than your usual Good Guy vs Bad Guy setup — the story has you flip back and forth about which you think is which several times.
The Pevensie children return to Narnia, but hundreds of years later, in Disney’s last adaptation from C.S. Lewis’ series (don’t worry, Fox have taken it over). For those keeping track, this is both the second book and second film, but fourth chronicle chronologically. Which is fine for now, but I wonder what they’ll do come those earlier-set ones…
held the record for the longest closing credits at 10 minutes. I don’t really know what’s common these days but 12 minutes is nonetheless 8% of the film.
or maybe it’s just counting on their memory a bit too much. With only limited characterisation and basic political complications, Prince Caspian really boils down to a series of fights and battles. Nicely done fights and battles, I’d argue, but still, no one’s coming away from this particularly enriched.
Whenever a star, director, writer, or other key creative dies during or around the production of a film, it’s apparently tempting to draw some kind of correlation between their death and the themes or content of their work. To force such a link between the murder of writer/director/co-star Adrienne Shelly and Waitress seems inappropriate, however, when the film is so much about life.
I know I 
Waitress is a “woman’s film”, but in a good way: written and directed from a female perspective, with its central roles being female, it doesn’t pander to a perceived female demographic and nor does it bellow “this is what we women think, and it’s so different to you damn men” — it’s more subtle than that.
You remember Righteous Kill, right? It’s the film that reunited De Niro and Pacino, only the second time they’d appeared on screen together. And while the first, 
he’s lensing a procedural thriller about a pair of 60-something cops and not Miami Vice 2. Suffice to say, it doesn’t work; if anything, it makes it worse. 
The film’s at its best when focusing on the De Niro/Pacino pairing, granting us the occasional good scene. Or just line — every little helps. But there’s not enough of that and too much of the dross. Other characters come and go with near-random irregularity, subplots are abandoned, or if they were resolved I missed it, and there are so many clichés you wish the DVD came with a spotters’ guide — at least ticking them off would give you something to do.
Before 
The scene the day after Jack saves Rose — where they have a natter on deck and she looks at his art for the first time; aka the primary scene for their falling for each other — is particularly weakly written. “Oh Jack, the plot requires me to look at your drawings now, so please hand them over.” The dialogue’s not actually that bad, but it’s bloody close.
And Leo is pretty-boy Leo. I’m not saying he’s not a talented actor — that was something he’d shown before Titanic and has certainly proven since, though everyone seemed to forget it in the late ’90s — but Jack Dawson is hardly a tricky task for him. Clearly he looks beautiful, has the loveable rogue thing down, and that’s job done.
Indeed, Titanic’s literally phenomenal success, and the subsequent abundance of spoofs and homages across all media in the decade-and-a-bit since, is an obstacle for any new viewer. One can’t watch Jack declare “I’m the king of the world!” without thinking of Cameron’s much-derided Oscar speech; can’t watch Jack and Rose ‘flying’ without thinking of any number of piss-takes; and French and Saunders spring to mind quite all over the place.
Apparently, the recent Michael Caine-starring 
The strongest element is probably Wendell Mayes’ script, because it constructs all this. Weakest is Michael Winner’s direction — some of it’s fine, the occasional shot even good, but largely it’s pedestrian and sometimes mediocre. That said, Winner has become such an unlikeable public figure that it’s somewhat difficult to gauge how much of this is bad direction and how much bias. Still, it’s not the kind of work to make one think, “he’s an idiot, but he knows how to do his job”.
I don’t really care about fashion, which means I really don’t care about Fashion — i.e. the world inhabited by Vogue and its American edition’s infamous editor, Anna Wintour. But I did watch 
Wintour, one suspects, will always be unknowable, a figurehead more than a person; but Grace is relatable, as human as the rest of us.
Speed Racer feels like an unfair place to kick off 
Even some of the performances stand out, not something you’d expect from such a (for want of a better word) lightweight tale. Of particular note are Susan Sarandon as Mom and Christina Ricci’s Trixie, whose huge eyes help render her perhaps one of the most perfect live-action versions of an anime character ever seen. Yes, the characters mostly exist to service their place in the plot, but the odd scene or glance or line delivery adds some subtlety here and there.
And, to specifically rubbish his opinions here, Phantom Menace is praised for being “made to be looked at more than listened to… filled with wonderful visuals” and condemns Speed Racer because “whatever information that passes from your retinas to your brain is conveyed through optical design and not so much through more traditional devices such as dialogue, narrative, performance or characterization… you could look at it with the sound off and it wouldn’t matter.” Not that Film’s unique factor (over novels or radio or what have you) is its visual sense, and a silent film that can be told through image alone, devoid of any intertitles, was once a lofty aim. I’m sure Ebert could readily explain why Phantom Menace’s visual splendour is a good thing and why Speed Racer’s is so terrible, but, on the other hand… pot, meet kettle.
Back to Speed Racer. In every respect it’s like a living cartoon, and it’s the Wachowskis’ commitment to this aesthetic in every single respect that makes it work where others have floundered. It’s not perfect, I suppose. It may run a little long at two-and-a-quarter hours; but then, it so rarely lets up that I didn’t mind a jot. And the kid is often annoying; but then, as annoying little kids in films go, I’ve seen worse. At times I even liked him.
100Films.co.uk 