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Independent Minds
The only puzzle of this toxically stupid Europhobe thriller is that its director (Pierre Morel) and producer (Luc Besson) are both French.
We are looking at cynicism on a very grand scale. Liam Neeson plays a special ops retiree who's guilty that his career in the US military has estranged him from his 17-year-old daughter. So he tries to make it up by letting her go spend three weeks in Europe, against his better instincts; and wouldn't you know, the kid no sooner gets to Paris than she and her pal are kidnapped by a gang of Albanian sex-traffickers. It turns out that the abducted girl's ultimate destination is a high-end flesh auction run for sleazeball plutocrats. But don't worry, Neeson's tearing up Paris in search of her, killing, torturing and maiming along the way. From this we are meant to gather that he's not only a great dad but a kick-ass American who'll teach these swarthy foreigners a lesson – as opposed to a trigger-happy psychotic who'll shoot an innocent woman point-blank: "It's only a flesh wound," he sneers.
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Comments
got abducted and raped by locals or mexican authorities, you cant make a movie about that because 1) it really happens, and 2) non-caucasians cant be the bad guy, ever, in movies, ever.
Like when the evil white south africans had nothing better to do in ''Lethal Weapon'' but come commit dastardly crimes in L.A., a city that in reality has one of the highest crime rates in the world, of which maybe 2-3% involves european-descended individuals.
Secondly, this is not a Europhobic film. American abduction occurs all over the world, as well as European abduction, at a larger rate than any Americans media source would report. This film is using a factual criminal occurrence to drive a fictional plot line. If you want balance, the writer of this film also directed the film "Leon", which is a movie were the European immigrant teaches the drug trafficking white Americans a lesson. Every film deals with stereotypes and cultural preconceptions, it's part of going to a movie. Give us, the audience, a little more credit than that.
It treads a familiar path: establish beyond doubt the total villainy of the wrongdoers, so that the hero is justified in using whatever tactics are needed. This in practice means brutality upon brutality - and that seems the whole point of the exercise, to cram in as many people experiencing pain, injury and death as cinematically possible.
A violent redneck fantasy, perhaps offering useful catharsis for male adolescents of all ages, but not much for anyone else to get their teeth into. What Liam Neeson is doing in the midst of this load of old cobblers is anyone's guess.
I am a father and if my children were taken I would kill and torture to get them back. But I would not expect anyone to defend my actions afterward. Torturing people (even in a cinematically pleasing way) is indefensible. Maiming and threatening to kill the wife of an opponent for information is inexcusable. Once the film is over and I am back in reality I agree with the criticisms in this article and am disturbed by the fact that people intelligent enough to read the article and eloquent enough to write responses are trying to defend the morality of this film. "this does happen all of the time in foreign countries"?? On that basis the film portrays Americans as gun-toting paranoids who would happily torture someone if it were done for the right reasons. Since we know the accusations directed at Guantanamo bay then this stereotype must also be true! Some of us prefer not to be sucked in by such film nonsense, some of us have visited France and met Arabs and US citizens and drawn our own conclusions. Unfortunately that does not hold true for a significant proportion of the several million who have watched this film and no doubt believe the underlying themes (don't trust Albanians, French, Arabs, its okay to torture people if you really need to) if not the specifics. So on that level it IS a bad film, at least in Lethal Weapon the comical South African anatagonists were the ones performing the torture and senseless killing and no one was trying to justify it. If you don't like film critics who over-analyse films don't read their column.