At the behest of friends, I went to see “Taken” this weekend. The movie ranked second in the top box office list with a total of 20.3 million dollars. To me, that is a good indicator the American audience loved it. I saw the trailers, but I was not expecting more than a mindless action movie.
I walked into the showroom holding my cup of a double Americano – which as I always do, snuck in. The place was packed. A couple of seats were spared at the two very front rows. I wasn’t gonna watch the movie with the tip of my nose touching the projection screen. Instead, I walked up the side stairs and sat on the red carpeted floor just as the movie started.
The storyline is mundane. A CIA operative with “a very special set of skills”, played by Liam Neeson, devoted his career to being what he labeled “a preventer,” making sure America’s enemies were eliminated. His service to his country had a steep price; his wife divorced him taking his daughter away from him. Guilt-ridden for neglecting his daughter’s needs while chasing terrorists around the globe protecting the US, he retires and settles in Los Angeles where she now lives with her millionaire step-father and mother.
The daughter, who is seventeen, decides to go on a trip to Europe with a friend. He is reluctant to approve it because his CIA experience taught him anywhere outside the US is dangerous. But he relents. Lo and behold, the daughter and her friend are kidnapped in Paris by a sex trafficking ring. The ex-CIA dotting father then flies to Paris, traces his daughter’s kidnappers in a record time, picking up hot leads faster than a hooker could wash her crack and sell it again. He drops bodies left and right. He even gets to torture one of the kidnappers and shoot the wife of a former intelligence “buddy” to get the information he needs. He kicks ass and takes names and finally saves his daughter and returns with her to LA where he is celebrated as a hero by not just his ex-wife, but her husband too. I was left wondering why the CIA is not sending agents like him to Afghanistan. This guy could have found Ossama Ben Laden in a couple of hours.
As I said earlier, a blood drenched, revenge driven B movie with all the explosions and car chases to keep you on the edge of your seat gawping.
I was gravely mistaken.
This movie was much more than that. It had a message to the younger generation. That is why, despite the lurid violence, it was rated PG13. I became more sensitive to the underlying message as our hero charges on in Paris behind the scent of his daughter. The first indicator came when he and his buddies from the agency reminisce about an operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah? How is this relevant to the story? Later on in Paris, our hero locates, at Rue Du Paradis (how symbolic), a group of Albanians who allegedly are his daughter’s kidnappers. They all had on their hands tattoos of a crescent and a star, a symbol generally regarded as Islamic nowadays. Our cowboy kills the evil Moslem men faster than Bob Munden draws his weapon; he saves one for torturing CIA style.
Then, he follows his leads until he finds his daughter being auctioned like a slave. The auction was run by a rich French businessman who gets wacked too. This part of the movie would have been more a propos in 2002 and 2003 when congress changed the names of French fries and French toast to freedom fries and freedom toast.
And guess who buys the kidnapped virgins? A fat, pompous, and cowardly Moslem Arab.
The audience cheered our hero on throughout the movie with applause, words of encouragement, and finally a good cheer when he shot the fat, pompous, and cowardly Moslem Arab as he hid behind the whimpering all American teenager.
The 93-minute movie got an 8 out of 10 rating on IMDb Its message is loud and clear: the enemy is Islam and whatever the US does to protect itself, no matter how unlawful it is, is justified.
In 2007, I saw another movie that tackled the theme of sex trade with more intensity and realism. It was “Trade.” It tells the story of a 13-year-old Mexican girl who was kidnapped by a sex trade ring in Mexico City and sold to pedophiles in … the US. “Trade” was based on the New York Times Magazine article “The Girls Next Door” by Peter Landesman who chronicled the operations of sex trafficking rings in American suburbia. The American audience was not as receptive of it as it is of “Taken.”
“Trade” could have been a tremendous success if the sex traders were Moslem and the protagonist killed a dozen Arab looking men to save the 13-year-old victim. Don’t you think?
A. T. B. Copyright © 2009
Wait a minute! The governments of the whole world (the U.S. excluded), outraged and crying foul, did not stymie Israel’s murderous assault on the Gaza Strip and its killing of hundreds of children, but it took a group of American Jews, bristled that two mediocre Israeli tennis players could not swing their tennis balls in front of Arab spectators, calling for the cancelation of a derisory tennis tournament for UAE to shamelessly yield. 
The dams are overflowing. More than 150 000 acres are flooded. Thousands of homes are destroyed leaving the residents stranded in the wet and frigid weather battling hypothermia. The death toll is high. Piling snow blocked a number of national roads isolating cities and villages from the rest of the country. Since this is the official report, we know the reality is much worse.
