Unquestionably overblown, the 2008 thriller Taken, starring Liam Neeson as a retired U.S. operative jolted into action when his teenaged daughter is kidnapped, still has much to offer in the way of a wake up call to the reality of sex trafficking, a despicable yet burgeoning global industry.
This movie combines the kind of thriller elements that make it a fast ride, including abductions, car chase scenes, bridge jumping, sprinkled with violence plenty, from choking, stabbing, and shooting, to interrogation by hand-rigged electric shock.
Not all escapist thriller flicks bear a message worth the genre’s insults. Insults like typecasting Albanian exiles in Paris as the sex traffickers and wealthy Arab sheiks as bulbous virgin-devouring sheiks whose henchmen deliver nameless women direct from high tech auction blocks. But Taken does, in part because Neeson, the overprotective father who would sacrifice himself to save his own daughter, ends up right about the scary downright evil world. And those who don’t believe it have two choices. Eat humble pie now, or save it for later.
It’s actually too bad this movie is so riddled with the special effects of a far-fetched feature film because viewers may dismiss the reality of human trafficking at its core as hyperbole. If anything saved that from happening, it would be Neeson’s acting as superman and father.
I only wish that at the end of this movie the producers would have run statistics, as movies sometimes do:
Between 244,000 and 325,000 American children and youth are at risk for sexual exploitation and sex trafficking every year. (University of Pennsylvania)
The average age of first being prostituted and trafficked in the commercial sex industry in the US is 13. (Polaris Project)
Fifty percent of transnational human trafficking victims are children. (US Dept. of Justice)
