‘Taken’: Suitable only for a captive audience
‘Origin story’ for the film franchise goes nowhere
This is simple: Don’t get Taken. Created for NBC as a prequel — oh, excuse me, origin story — for the already overextended movie franchise, Taken (Monday, 10 ET/PT,
out of four) * takes the worst traits of your garden variety big-screen action clunker and repackages them for home viewing. Inane, loud, violent and littered with directorial flourishes meant to distract you from the sloppy plotting and largely indifferent acting,
Taken is almost bad enough to make you wish NBC would just offer another Chicago spinoff.
But don’t. You’re getting one of those, too, on Wednesday, and it’s almost equally awful.
Set in the present — and yet, somehow, also 30 years before the first movie — Taken stars Clive Standen ( Vikings) as Bryan Mills, the character Liam Neeson played in the three films. A young former Green Beret, Bryan is riding a train with his sister when tragedy strikes, kicking off the series and Bryan’s string of being the most star-crossed family member since Oedipus.
Shaken but still in command of all his considerable killing skills, Bryan is determined to bring the bad guy to justice. But first he must learn whom to trust (he’s bad at that) and whom to forgive — an area in which he’s almost incomprehensibly lenient.
Eventually, Bryan finds himself recruited by a covert-ops team led by Christina Hart (Jennifer Beals), one of those steely whatever-it-takes types who runs her own floating prison and is not above assassinating members of our own government. It’s a testament to Beals — who, with Gaius Charles, is the only actor to come out of
Taken unscathed — that we find ourselves rooting for and believing in Christina far more often than the script alone would support.
And so Bryan begins his adventures, which judging from the episodes made available for preview constitute about five minutes of actual plot each week. The rest of the time is spent showing Bryan running, riding, punching, shooting, stalking and surveilling — interrupted now and then so he can stare soulfully into the camera as he remembers the first of his many traumas to come.
At the center of all this stands Standen, a good-looking, personable actor who seems completely at a loss here. There’s no depth and weight in the performance: In scenes where he’s supposed to appear intent, he merely seems vacant. (He’s better in the lighter moments, but those are few and very far between.) Not that any actor could do much with what producer Luc Besson has supplied, but Standen needs to at least appear to be trying to do more.
As for what you should do, that’s also simple: Watch something else.