Taken--Movie Review

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you do. But I will find you. I will kill you." Ah, the famous line many of us heard during the promotional commercials for the thrilling movie Taken. That line alone, sparked my interest and plunged me into the set of Taken.

Bryan Mills, who is played by actor Liam Neeson, is a retired X-CIA spy. Overtime he has acquired a certain set of special skills in which he can fight, investigate and kill. His daughter Kim, played by Maggie Grace, lives with her mother. Dad and daughter have a drifting relationship due to the fact that previous years in the CIA has kept him busy and on the road. Mills decides to retire in order for him and his daughters relationship to rekindle and so that he can be close to her. Kim approaches her father with a question asking to go on an international trip with her friend Amanda, played by Kate Cassidy. Still being in high school, her father is reluctant to let two young girls travel overseas alone. Finally, he agrees to letting her go but only after Kim agrees to daily phone calls and of course one letting him know she arrives safely.

When the girls arrive at the airport in Paris, they grab their bags and walk out to the streets where they try to get a cab to take them to Amanda's cousins house. A cute boy that the two meet, who happens to be a recruit for a sex slave ring, offers to share a cab with the girls in hopes of getting some information from them. They make the mistake of telling him where they are staying and that they are in fact there alone. After saying good-bye he makes a call informing the person on the other line of the information he has obtained.

Kim, forgetting to call her father when they arrived, noticed she had a missed call from him so takes her phone in another room and calls her father. Here's where it gets interesting...! Only moments after their conversation begins, Kim sees Amanda being taken out of the house by a group of men. Frantically informing her father of this, he tells her to enter another room and get under the bed. She does this and then goes on to say that what he tells her next is key. Kim is told that she will be taken. Once she is, her father instructs her to yell out everything she sees and then he will come find her. With only 96 hours to find Kim, we see her father's set of special skills released throughout the chase.

The action that unfolds kept me on the edge of my seat and I instantly developed a sense of hate for the men that had kidnapped Kim and Amanda. A father's love is so strong that when his precious joy is taken from him anyone can become invincible. The clues that Mills collected and his clever ways of obtaining them was an excitement in its own. Based on instances that have occurred in our world, with women being kidnapped and taken to other countries, Taken posed as a real eye-opener as to what may be going on when these women are captured. Families may rethink sending their students overseas, but if anything it should teach us that you can't be naive and never too careful. The determination Mills shows in getting his daughter back is a prime example of a father's divine love.