Duties (2008)

Directed by: Pierre Morel | 94 minutes | action, thriller | Actors: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Xander Berkeley, Katie Cassidy, Olivier Rabourdin, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, David Warshofsky, Holly Valance, Nathan Rippy, Camille Japy, Nicolas Giraud, Gérard Watkins, Arben Bajraktaraj, Affif Ben Badra Radivoje Bukvic, Valida Carroll, Fred Dessains, Danny Flood, David Forax, Rosemary Garris, Fani Kolarova, Goran Kostic, Edwin Kruger, Marcus Lindsey, Nabil Massad, Patrick Médioni, Jalil Naciri, Anca Radici, Christy Reese, Opender Singh, Helena Soubeyrand, Caitlin Stasey, Anatole Taubman, Olivier Vitrant

Somehow Taken is a ‘wrong’ film. Okay, action is good, all flashy filmed. The fact is reminiscent of ‘The Bourne Identity’ and works well, because it plays on the general desire to have more in you than meets the eye, but also especially on fear and hatred against everything that is wrong and criminal and thus our perfect life is disrupted with unheard of slander. “They had to kill those people!”.

So that’s exactly what Brian (Liam Neeson) does. And luckily, he’s very adept at it, because his entire (past) career, he worked for the CIA, “to prevent certain things from happening,” which is convenient. The naughty gentlemen will know, because Brian comes after them and leaves a trail of death and destruction, delicious! Finally revenge on the worst of the worst kind: traffickers. Men who lack an ounce of feeling or conscience and who all deserve to die, right? How much exactly does it take to justify murder and manslaughter? Demonization is a widely used principle to stamp ‘enemies’ that justifies extermination. The Nazis already did it with the Jewish population, who they literally depicted as dark figures, with unshaven heads and black ominous eyes, who, according to the stories, were after your children. Today it is the ‘terrorists’ from the Middle East who instill fear in us in the West, or thus the equally unshaven and dangerous-looking men from the Balkans.

Just to be clear: the crimes described in this film are partly reality and are too terrible for words and it is not the intention to label the makers of this film as Nazis. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the film makes a number of statements seem crystal clear without any kind, but above all without any nuance: people who have done bad things deserve to die one by one and if you are the executioner you don’t have to tell anyone for a second. account for it, after all it was for ‘the good cause’.

And further: never go to Europe alone if you are a woman and under eighteen, always listen to your father and of course the persistent cliché: people with a lot of money are bad. Welcome to the world of American paranoia. It’s the moral of these kinds of movies that brings and sustains violence in the first place. Should ‘Taken’ then have some kind of Christian, humanitarian and biologically responsible content, in which forgiveness is the message and everyone comes together in a harmonious utopia? Not really, but a little more nuance and deeper psychological depth would have been nice.