"I have a very particular set of skills, skills that I have aquired over a very long period of time"
What do you do if your 17-year-old daughter flies to Paris with another teen friend and is kidnapped by sex traffickers within hours of arriving? Well, if you're retired CIA agent Bryan Mills, you go get her—brutally dispatching every one of the interlopers involved. That's the premise in Taken.
But let's rewind the tape a bit.
Bryan Mills was a good CIA agent. But until now, he hasn't been such a great father. Years spent overseas have taken a toll on his family relationships. So on the eve of daughter Kim's 17th birthday, he's turned over a new leaf: retiring from the Agency and moving to Los Angeles, where he hopes to repair the damage his absence has done. His five-year marriage to Kim's mom went up in smoke years ago. But he clings to the idea that devoting all his energy and affection to Kim might somehow salvage something. Anything.
Before he can get started, though, Kim hatches a plan of her own: a trip to Europe with her best bud Amanda to see Paris and stay with her cousins there. Her world-wary dad doesn't like the idea one bit. But his daughter's enthusiasm and his ex-wife's haranguing make him relent—on the condition that Kim calls him daily with updates on her whereabouts.
She, of course, forgets his instructions the moment her plane touches down on French soil. And soon, she and Amanda meet a nice, helpful young Frenchman named Peter who graciously offers to share a cab with them and split the fare.
Kim and Amanda have hardly said goodbye to Peter and begun to unpack at her cousins' commodious abode (they're not home) when the phone rings: Dad. Kim's annoyance with her hyper-vigilant father, however, melts into desperation when she witnesses Amanda being kidnapped in another room.
"There's someone here. Oh my god, they got Amanda. They're coming."
"All right," Dad instructs. "Listen to me. Go to the next bedroom, under the bed. Tell me when you're there. Now, the next part is very important: They're going to take you."
And they do.
Throughout Taken, Bryan demonstrates deep devotion to Kim—both before and after her abduction. We watch as he looks longingly at old birthday pictures and home movies of her. Knowing that she longs to be a pop singer, he gets Kim a state-of-the-art karaoke machine and uses a hard-won connection to give her a leg up in the industry. But far beyond that, Bryan's ferocious love for his daughter compels him past every obstacle once she's been abducted.
With help from CIA friends, Bryan learns that Kim's kidnappers are likely a group of human traffickers from Albania ... and that he has about 96 hours to find her before she disappears into the black hole of sex slavery. And so he uses clues from his short conversation with one of her kidnappers to piece together, CSI-style, important clues that eventually point the way to her location.
In the process, Taken shines a revelatory light on the scourge of human trafficking, a ruthless underworld where even one innocent mistake condemns a girl to a life of drugged sex bondage. Further to its credit, the filmmakers exercise some restraint in the ways they depict these young women's forced prostitution. (More on that in "Sexual Content.")
In his search for Kim, Bryan rescues a young woman who's ended up with Kim's coat. He takes her to a hotel room where he sets up an IV to help get the drugs out of her system. Bryan is motivated in part by his need for information from the woman, but it's clear that he's tenderly treating her the same way he would his own daughter.
