{"id":39,"date":"2012-10-13T16:40:16","date_gmt":"2012-10-13T16:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/?p=39"},"modified":"2017-06-11T10:39:44","modified_gmt":"2017-06-11T14:39:44","slug":"why-do-i-like-taken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/?p=39","title":{"rendered":"Why do I like Taken?"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the recent release of Taken 2<\/em>, a movie which I have no intention of ever seeing, I decided to do some introspection and think about why I even liked the first movie. I liked it when it came out, I still like it when I watch it again, I’ll probably like it the next time I see it, but for the life of me I don’t know why.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve always had a soft spot for revenge movies, as well as for Liam Neeson, so that might explain part of it. Movies that play into my fantasy that bad people always\u00a0get their comeuppance at the hands of a middle-aged dad get a few free points before even starting. That’s pretty much the only reason I ever saw that one movie with Mel Gibson and the radioactive milk. You know the one.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it’s not enough. At least, it wasn’t to save Mel Gibson’s radioactive milk movie. So why do I remember Taken<\/em> so fondly?<\/span><\/p>\n

Let’s get it out of the way: Taken<\/em> is super misogynistic. Not just because it’s a tale of a father saving his daughter from evil men, more because it’s a tale of a man who proves to his ex-wife that she was wrong to divorce him, to his daughter that she knows nothing about the world, and to his wife’s new husband that his (Neeson’s) insane overprotection makes him a better father. Also because every woman in the movie is either\u00a0a damsel in distress or, at best,\u00a0absolutely clueless.\u00a0Also because the slutty girl is punished for being such a slutty slut (i.e. having had sex at age 19), and Neeson’s daughter only surviving because she’s a virgin (sorry, I mean “pure”).<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s also super racist, and seems to follow some sort of gradient where characters are more evil the further from America they come from.<\/span><\/p>\n

That movie is a dad’s wet dream; proving not only that he’s not irrelevant, but that he was right all along. The movie’s basically saying “I told you so!” for 90 minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n

So why do I like it? I guess because it’s not insultingly dumb. Well, until Liam Neeson plows right\u00a0through a trailer in an SUV. Or\u00a0wipes the floor with a dozen trained bodyguards while bleeding out from a bullet wound to the gut. Wait…\u00a0Looking back, it does have a lot of insultingly dumb moments…<\/span><\/p>\n

Hmmm…<\/span><\/p>\n

Wow, I really don’t know why I like Taken<\/em>. It does have that “faux-realism” that Die Hard <\/em>had in its action scenes. And they\u00a0did hire actual Albanian and French actors. At least I think. And they did shoot some of it on location. But it really shouldn’t be enough to carry an entire movie. I wish I wasn’t so good-movie-deprived that I start to remember mediocre movies fondly, but I am, so I am. If that’s also how you feel, and you haven’t seen Taken<\/em>, maybe you should.<\/span><\/p>\n

That’s as far as I’m going to recommend it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the recent release of Taken 2, a movie which I have no intention of ever seeing, I decided to do some introspection and think about why I even liked the first movie. I liked it when it came out, I still like it when I watch it again, I’ll probably like it the next time I see it, but for the life of me I don’t know why. I’ve always had a soft spot…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15,16,14],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-review","tag-liam","tag-neeson","tag-taken"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordlesspen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}