Taken, 2008
Welcome back to another edition of Saturday Night Movie Sleepovers! This week J. Blake and Dion Baia are covering a recent classic (well recent for them), a movie that was a breakout hit and jump-started an entire sub-genre. The boys are headed to Paris, as they tackle the Liam Neeson thriller, Taken, from 2008.
Dion and Blake jump right in, laying out the plot and discuss the reasons they love this film. They analyse other movies that inhabit this genre and praise this tight and fast-moving script, and speculate as to why an otherwise straight-forward, run-of-the-mill action movie starring an actor in his mid-50’s can be such a great, extremely popular action-adventure! So grab your foreign currency, burner phones, and plane tickets, because the boys have 96 hours to straighten everything out on another episode of Saturday Night Movie Sleepovers!
Extras:
Check out the original 2008 trailer for Taken!
Have a look at this interview with Liam Neeson about the film.
Take a look at this YouTube film of Taken, in 2 minutes.
And of course, we need to thank this episode’s sponsor mackweldon.com! Keep an ear out for the advertisement in this episode for a promo code to save money on your first order!
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Wow, a more recent movie? I like it!
Taken was one of the reasons I got a blu-ray player. I’d heard for a year about this movie (Like you said, cause of the leak or early release in Europe)and I knew of people who got the blu-ray imported before the movie hit theaters here. It felt like there were some cool movies I didn’t have access to, so I started looking into region-free blu-ray players. And yes, eventually I saw Taken.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed the movie. I was afraid the movie wouldn’t live up to the hype, but I’m glad I was wrong. I still love the “I told you I’d find you!” That was such a fist pump moment for me.
Great episode, guys! Keep up the good work like always.
I think you guys are onto something about Kimmy being on the spectrum. I always read it as somewhere between weak direction (not Pierre’s fault, per se, just that he’s a young guy and maybe he’s not a kid’s director) and making the stakes higher: the more childlike she is, the more shocking the notion that she’s been taken.
Also, I agree with you about the pace of the film. It’s one of its virtues. The Bad Guy hatches his plan (taking the girls) on, say, page 23, whereas in a more tradition US film, the Bad Guy does it on page 33 or so. Perfect example: Die Hard. It takes a long time for Hans to pull that gun at the party. (Hey, when are you gonna do that film?!)
Die Hard has been on our to-do list since we started the show. “We will look for Die Hard, we will watch Die Hard, and we will Podcast about Die Hard.”
– Blake