The Nappy Cat Chronicles

Sometimes, it’s satisfying to watch a straight line be drawn. While watching Taken, I found myself happy that I was to forgo the highs in order to avoid the pain of the lows. Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is a retired CIA agent with “a very particular set of skills” whose daughter is kidnapped by bad guys who kidnap, drug, turn out, and sell young women.

Personally, I found myself most thrilled when Bryan says the following to his daughter Kim’s kidnapper:

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.

From that point forward, you fully anticipate that Bryan will kill everyone involved the kidnapping with ease. And he doesn’t disappoint. This is where the movie goes right: Bryan is unambiguously the hero. Though they’re one-dimensional representations, the movie won’t have you believe that everyone involved in the kidnapping deserves to die. Simply, Bryan deserves to kill everyone involved in the kidnapping.

Unfortunately, the movie resorts to “deus ex machine” twice. In the first instance, Bryan finds Kim’s travel partner, Amanda, dead. If she had been alive, Bryan would have wasted valuable time saving her. In the second instance, the her kidnappers have sold Kim because she is a virgin. This provides Bryan with the extra time that he needs to rescue her.

After viewing this film yesterday, I’m still asking myself, if I had the ability to, would I kill everyone involved in a kidnapping in order to rescue someone I loved? I think, yes, I would. Sometimes, there’s a time to kill. Sometimes, there must be death in order to preserve life, even one. But then again, I don’t even own a gun and I doubt I’d be able to stay alive long enough to kill everyone before I made them all more angry than necessary.