Why Liam Neeson Might Be The Bad Guy In The ‘Taken’ Movies

At first, I thought Taken was pretty hilarious. The stakes were so high and Liam Neeson was so sincerely intense and that infamous phone call is melodramatic to the extreme. And the action scenes were so beautifully over-the-top and vicious that I couldn’t do anything but giggle. But then, something happened that made me completely turn on Liam Neeson’s Bryan Mills.

There’s a moment halfway through the film in which Bryan discovers that the Albanian mob who’s kidnapped his daughter is keeping a brothel in a construction site. There are dozens of other teen girls locked up and being kept docile with drugs. The implication is that his daughter is just the latest girl stolen away from her life and forced to sell her body for money. It’s rape on a mass scale.

How does Bryan react? He ignores it. He lets these girls stay trapped in their suffering. The only girl Bryan helps is one wearing his daughter Kim’s jacket because her only value to him is her connection to Kim. It never occurs to Bryan that this girl is as much an innocent as his daughter. You could argue that he’s so committed to saving his daughter that nothing will stand in his way. You could also argue that he’s a sociopathic villain who only cares that his daughter was kidnapped because it gives him an excuse to murder as many people as he wants.

Usually when you set up any sort of action film where a solitary hero is going to have to fight, maim, and kill his or her way in order to achieve a goal, you’ve got to have a reason to root for them. As much as our animal nature craves violence, we have deeply rooted moral convictions. One of those is the belief that murder is bad. So, if we are to spend 90 minutes watching one man brutally kill half of Albania, we’ve got to feel that he’s in the right. You’ll notice that in most movies about revenge, the hero might go on a crazy rampage, but he or she will usually let the innocent bystanders get out of their path. They usually only tussle with trained professionals sent to kill them. They don’t usually let dozens of girls stay sedated in a rape brothel in a construction yard. So, yeah, Taken kind of lost me there.

I realize that you’re not necessarily supposed to stop and think about the Taken movies. This is probably because the films weren’t intended to be a great treatise on morality and the concept of revenge. They were supposed to be frothy action thrillers that fed into our primal need to see blood and to feel the catharsis of vengeance. And yet, the more I thought about Taken, the more I realized that its franchise might be one of the closest things we have in modern cinema to classic revenge plays.

I’m, of course (because you’re up on your Elizabethan and Jacobean drama), talking about plays like Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy or William Shakepeare’s Titus Andronicus. These dark and gruesome dramas let the audience revel in violence, but ultimately, the protagonists are punished for taking revenge. Often this leads to everyone killing each other in crazed retribution. While the protagonists are likable, they are morally in the wrong and must pay the cost.

Ironically, it is Bryan Mills’ intense obsession with exacting revenge at any cost, even at the cost of transforming himself into a villain, that makes him a rather perfect protagonist for this classical genre. In Taken 2, his family is threatened by the family of all those Albanians he killed, and in Taken 3 his wife is ostensibly killed in retribution for all the murders he’s committed. While I doubt Taken 3 will end with Maggie Grace being killed by Dougray Scott, and Liam Neeson killing Dougray Scott, and then Forest Whitaker and Liam Neeson stabbing each other to death, I do think that there is a hint of a revenge tragedy vibe happening in these films. The protagonist is ultimately in the wrong and has to suffer loss and degradation as a consequence.

The Taken franchise may never fully commit to the conceits of the revenge drama. After all, Bryan Mills has to win in the end. But still, I think that one moment in the first film is there to show that for all that Bryan may love his ex-wife and daughter, he is not a morally upright person. Bryan Mills is a person we can root for, but he’s no great hero.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuU0M2xBasc]

 

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Photos: Everett Collection