For episode 19 we went full throttle into Taken (2008), a hyper-efficient father-daughter revenge fantasy that launched Liam Neeson into late-career action-hero orbit.* You know the line. You probably heard it quoted before, or even quoted it yourself after watching this modern-day classic: “What I do have are a very particular set of skills…”
Directed by Pierre Morel—formerly Luc Besson’s go-to cinematographer (he shot The Transporter, directed District 13)—Taken is shot like a first-person shooter game crossed with 24. This is Morel at the height of his kinetic hand-cam phase, still operating the camera himself, a la Kubrick (who couldn’t give it up either). Written by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (Karate Kid, Fifth Element, The Transporter), the film is lean, mean, and problematic as hell—and that’s why we discussed it on the heels of Not Without My Daughter.
Liam Neeson was 54 when he made Taken. This was supposed to be a one-off European thriller. Instead, it detonated into a franchise and reinvented Neeson as an aging, grim-faced action star who drives fast, punches harder, and glowers best. And it’s not just Neeson—he’s part of a lineage: Tom Cruise, David Statham, and Denzel Washington to name just a few, all proving that sixty is the new thirty and that they’ll never cede top billing to emerging talent (fucking Boomers!).
At its emotional core, Taken is a divorced-dad fantasy. Bryan Mills (Neeson) is the classic estranged father: he missed birthdays, ruined relationships, and now has to win his daughter back by murdering half of Paris. He can’t connect with her in real life (karaoke machine vs. stepdad’s literal horse), but when she’s kidnapped by Albanian traffickers while on vacation, he becomes the perfect dad: protective, resourceful, unstoppable.
The message is pretty simple? If your kid gets abducted, all your failings are retroactively forgiven if you have combat training.
The speech over the phone is the most iconic moment in the film, and Neeson delivers it brilliantly (see full speech in video above):
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want… What I do have are a very particular set of skills… I will find you, and I will kill you.”
Not only is it iconic, but it also functions as a moral permission slip for the audience. Everything that follows is not just justified, it’s righteous. The film traffics (pun intended) in a lot of nasty tropes: shadowy immigrant criminals, morally compromised French officials, and the utter collapse of European civility in the face of American justice (boy does that seem especially quaint these days).
From the chaotic Parisian safe houses to the red-door brothel of doom, Taken is one long endorsement of the rogue American agent cleaning up the corrupt, decadent old world. And yet—it’s so tightly paced, so brutally efficient, so entertaining, that you can’t help but cheer for all of it. Because Liam Neeson isn’t just avenging a daughter, he’s avenging all absentee parents who ever missed a dance recital. This is revenge-as-redemption, and it’s hard not to eat it up.
Similarly to Not Without My Daughter, Taken is American family values propaganda dressed up as vigilante pulp. But that’s easy to overlook given it’s pure cinematic adrenaline that plays on deep fears (parental helplessness) and deeper fantasies (parental omnipotence) and in Liam Neeson, it gave us the patron saint of aging badasses.
As for personal parenting stories, Michael shares his own badass moment in which he gives Bryan Mills a run for his (lack of) money—-shirtless no less! As for my own tale, its the antithesis of a super dad moment. It shares a similarly European feel as Taken, but my misadventures never end in redemption—and probably for good reason. I could try and describe them here, but then why would you listen to the brilliant podcast we spent all this time fashioning just for you!
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*The experimentation with ChatGPT for these Family Pictures Podcast posts continues. I’m limiting my explorations with AI to these posts because MBS and I have written extensive show notes for each and every episode we recorded, and the machine does a fairly good job summarizing them as a starting point. What’s more, I’m kinda having fun with playing with this and I am not too concerned given the bava has always been a space where I experiment. That said, I know using AI to write posts can be a touchy issue, so at the very least wanted to be transparent that I’m doing that here. I’ll write a longer, more in-depth post on the process, but more than anything the AI-generated post is a base that I then deconstruct and re-create. While it does not save that much time, it does provide some interesting opportunities to reflect on my writing style (if that’s what you can call it).
