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February 5-11, 2009
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Taken a walk on the wild side
by Christopher Borrelli
An uninvited twist
by Michael Phillips
 Taken a walk on the wild side
by Christopher Borrelli
Taken, which tells the story of how Liam Neeson blows a gasket and flies off to France and kills 75 Albanians in 90 minutes, is crisp, efficient and deeply insane. Neeson, who now resembles an aging Labrador retriever, all angles and mournful eyes and jumpy eagerness, plays a former CIA spook whose clandestine career bled into his home and made blood sausage of his family. His wife has divorced him, taken their 17-year-old daughter and remarried. She now lives a life of entitlement behind the stone walls of a Los Angeles mansion, the estate of her new industrialist husband. Neeson’s character, Bryan Mills, is so protective of his daughter that he moves to L.A. to be within reach of her. He is paranoid about the potential dangers, and so humorless he could be played for parody — thankfully, though, St. Guilty Pleasure has shined upon us, and this thing is serious.
It also feels, already, a couple of weeks into the Obama administration, like a relic of a former political atmosphere — despite being made by French producer Luc Besson and some of the European folks behind that hurtling go-go-go Transporter series. The bad guys are French, Eastern European, and a handful of generic Middle Eastern stereotypes. And although daddy means well, he tears apart society to prove it. But first: Bryan’s daughter (Maggie Grace) asks to fly to Europe with her best friend, and Bryan says this is a bad idea because there are evildoers in the world, but his daughter says she just wants to follow U2 across the continent (“all the kids do it,” Bryan’s wife says), so Bryan agrees begrudgingly and within minutes — nay, seconds — of stepping into Charles de Gaulle International, his daughter and friend are kidnapped by sex traffickers. Told ya. The good news is that they’ve been spared sitting through 17 renditions of “Where the Streets Have No Name.” The bad news is that they’re about to be sold into slavery.
Bryan has 96 hours to find her. Why 96? Because that’s the number his fellow former-CIA friends pull out of their, ahem, back pockets. After the first 20 minutes, however — during which I found myself pining for the days of Generic Harrison Ford Action Vehicles and that signature scowl (“Give me back my daughter!” “Get off my plane!”) — it wasn’t hard settling into Oskar Schindler, Avenging Angel. Neeson is too smart an actor to step into the path of a picture with this much forward momentum.
The movie overheats cleanly around him, moving from nuts to stupid without pausing for sentiment or logic or even the sort of basic explanation most filmmakers would accept as fundamental. Instead, see this and you will want to slam someone’s head against a table, which is a nice feeling, assuming you don’t act on it. “You can’t run around tearing down Paris,” friend Jean-Claude tells him. “I would tear down the Eiffel Tower, Jean-Claude!” he shouts, then proceeds to karate-chop his way through mimes, baguette peddlers and the cast of Cirque du Soleil (if I remember correctly). Neeson is cold-eyed and brutal, Jason Bourne-esque, as he works his way ever closer to his daughter, who may already be drugged and shipped away to Whoknowswhere. There is no mythology, no irony, no real soul — just a Charles Bronson simplicity about the whole affair. Which, in the hands of director Pierre Morel, of the equally speedy District B13, is the whole point — an entertaining appreciation of efficiency itself.
—MCT
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 An uninvited twist
by Michael Phillips
There’s a substantial twist in The Uninvited, a pretty fair and reasonably scary remake of South Korean director Kim Jee-Woon’s thriller A Tale of Two Sisters. The twist was there in the stylish original, which I watched after the English-language redo. If one of my film-critic colleagues hadn’t guessed the twist out loud, and correctly, I might very well have been taken in by it. But you know? I’ll never know.
The Guard Brothers directed The Uninvited. They are Thomas and Charles, and they are British, and while much of their work here stays in strict stylistic line with the 2003 original, they supply jolts efficiently. Any idiot can frighten an audience with a “boo!” moment — the heroine turning suddenly, only to be startled by some innocent character, for example. Almost any idiot can direct a sequence involving the slow approach to a creepy, concealing object, out of which something will spring or ooze or fly. But the quality of the surprise after the suspense is what separates the hacks from the talent. The Guard Brothers cut fast and rarely steer clear of cliché, but they have a knack.
After 10 months in a psychiatric clinic, Anna (Emily Browning) returns to her coastal Maine home to her sister, Alex (Arielle Kebbel), and an uneasy new parental unit. The girls’ father (David Strathairn) is engaged to the very same caregiver (Elizabeth Banks) who oversaw the girls’ invalid mother in her last days, before a mysterious and fatal fire. Anna attempted suicide after the tragedy. Now, back home, she’s plagued by ghosts or visions or some such, one of which appears to be her late mother, crying out for revenge. It’s like Hamlet, with teenage girls.
The script ties the original scenario in a couple of ill-advised knots, and by the final third, The Uninvited has turned into a film existing mainly for its long-delayed twist. The actors are strong, however, and Banks in particular shows some skill and wiles in keeping her rascally stepmother stereotype lively.
What do I remember about The Uninvited a day after seeing the remake? I remember jumping at the specter under the kitchen stove. I remember also the alarming number of times we see a character approach a plastic garbage bag with dread and wonder. These aren’t Glad bags. These are “Aaaaahhhhggggghhhh!” bags.
—MCT
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