Taken – 2-Disc Extended Cut, Blu-ray (2009)
Starring: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace
Director: Pierre Morel
Studio: Fox [Release date: May 12, 09] (Also available as single disc version)
Video: 2.40:1 anamorphic/enhanced for 16:9 color 1080p HD
Audio: English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, Spanish & French DD 5.1, DD 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH, French, Spanish
Extras: Choice of theatrical or extended cut versions with audio commentary by Pierre Morel, writer Robert Mark Kamen, cinematographers Michel Abramowicz and Michel Julienne; Making Of featurette; Inside Action: Side-by-Side Comparisons of: Peter Dies/Bryan Escapes Construction Site/Good Luck/The Interrogation/Bryan at St. Claire’s/Boat Fight; Black OPS Field Manual; Avant Premiere; Digital copy file for portable players on 2nd disc.
Length: 90 minutes
Rating: ****
Liam Neeson, perhaps best known for his 1994 Oscar for Schindler’s List, proves a versatile action figure in this often violent thriller. He plays a now-retired American spy struggling with divorce, due partly to his having spent so little time with his wife and daughter Kim. His ex has married a wealthy man who shows him up at Kim’s 17th birthday by giving her a horse when Neeson’s Brian has only given her a boombox. Brian now dotes on Kim to make up for his lack of attention earlier, and at first resists his approval when she wants to travel to Paris with a girlfriend.
He finds when delivering her to the airport that the two are not staying only in Paris to visit museums, but plan to travel thruout Europe following U2’s tour. When she phones him after their arrival in Paris he also learns that the residents of the flat in which they are staying are in Spain. While on the phone to him both girls are abducted by Albanian mobsters into white slavery and Brian rushes to Paris to make use of his special killer skills to get his daughter back at all cost.
Brian’s former spy co-workers tell him he probably has only 96 hours to get her back and then she is lost. He puts his CIA expertise to the test and quickly finds the same man who acted friendly to the two girls upon their arrival, shared a taxi and learned their exact location. After a violent chase, the man leaps onto a busy highway and is killed by a passing truck. This doesn’t slow Brian down a bit, as he gets an Albanian interpreter, studies an English-Albanian dictionary, and eventually walks into a nest of Albanian criminals in which he identifies the very man he spoke to briefly on the phone when his daughter was kidnapped. As his path of killing criminals progresses he meets up with a former associate who now has a desk job with the Paris police. However, it turns out he is involved in some way with the Albanian criminal activity and tries unsuccessfully to send Brian back to the U.S. empty-handed.
Brian’s activities continue on an extreme edge-of-your-seat level to the final expected saving of his daughter and their return to the U.S. A side story is Brian’s effort to get his daughter connected with a celebrity vocalist, which he accomplishes while doing security for a concert by the singer.
In his brief phone exchange with the leader of the criminal pack Brian had told him he had special skills and he would hunt him down and kill him. That’s what he does, but not without a disturbing “24”-style torture scene, which I could have done without. This certainly is a pumped-up thriller and the Blu-ray transfer looks great via the new Oppo Blu-ray universal player, even before I tweaked the video parameters. The DTS lossless surround track makes full use of the gunfights, explosions and grinding gears. I didn’t do a comparison of the theatrical and extended cut versions, but they seem to be the same length, which mystifies me a bit. I wonder if the theatrical made some cuts in the torture sequence…
– John Sunier
