Comments | horridporrid: Saw Taken; Had some thoughts...

horridporrid

Saw Taken; Had some thoughts...

Feb 07, 2009 21:04

So I just saw the movie "Taken", wherein Liam Neeson plays a daddy out to save his little girl. If you turn your brain off, it does its job as an action movie. It's when I started thinking that the problems started piling up. ( major spoilers )

meta, movies

Comments 8

sistermagpie February 8 2009, 03:45:43 UTC

This makes me think of when I saw the original Cape Fear. It was fascinating because it was so clearly about damaging a man's property (his wife and especially his daughter) in revenge. It's like the daughter is on the boat with the bad guy and the threat is that he's going to rape her. And what's weird is that it's not just that the daughter is going to be hurt and that's bad and we want to avoid that but if we can't avoid it she'll live. No, over and over again they talk about how the daughter is basically going to be *ruined* by this. It's like he might as well be murdering her, because she's going to be ruined if the father doesn't get to her before he rapes her ( ... )

horridporrid February 8 2009, 04:03:35 UTC

This was a lot like that, especially for a movie made in this day and age. I mean, no one out and out said the daughter would be ruined if she was actually raped, but... They made sure she wasn't. Her being a virgin made her that much more precious (which kept her safer for longer -- she was the "best for last" in the bidding room). And her non-virgin friend (who did not have a father out looking for her) died of a drug over-dose in a filthy room on a filthy bed. So there was definitely an undertone of the preciousness of "purity".

And yes, it was definitely all up to Liam's character to keep his girl/property safe.

naye February 8 2009, 08:26:49 UTC

Uh. I haven't seen that movie, but the trends you describe sound deeply, deeply disturbing. I don't even know what to say, just. I will be staying far away from the movie, because for all that I like my brainless action, there is a limit to how long I can keep my brain from rebelling at the sheer WTF'ery of this kind of writing. Sob. Why are we still making movies like this, whyyyyy?

horridporrid February 8 2009, 23:01:58 UTC

Why are we still making movies like this, whyyyyy?

I don't know. :( I thought we'd gotten past it. At least a little bit. I'm thinking of tiny little Alyssa Milano in a bad 80's movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger as her daddy. Or (iirc) Bruce Willis's daughter in the last Die Hard movie. They both gave their kidnappers a hard time. Or Marie from the Bourne trilogy. She wasn't an operative like Jason Bourne, but she was definitely her own person with her own strengths. And of course, Pam Landy was awesome.

I'm hoping this movie is more a lazy anomaly (there were a lot of holes, and Liam was the only fleshed-out character, very relatively speaking) then anything else. Laziness combined with the spectacularly unthoughtful decision to set it against the sex trade that's hurt so very many women and girls.

ariadne83 February 9 2009, 07:17:56 UTC

I found just the trailer quite disturbing. "Now listen to me. You're going to be taken." So calm and matter-of-fact, and setting up the idea that she would be the helpless victim.

horridporrid February 9 2009, 22:05:19 UTC

Interestingly, that's the part of the trailer that intrigued me. I thought it was setting up that Liam's character wasn't infallible (he couldn't come charging to the rescue right then and there, like Superman with Lois Lane), and therefore the daughter was going to have to look after herself for a little bit. I mean, I got that Liam was going to charge to the rescue eventually, just... I was expecting the daughter to do some cool stuff to keep herself as safe as possible in a horrible situation, and maybe drop some breadcrumbs for her dad to follow. Start working for the rescue from the inside, you know?

Alas, that scene was about the end of the daughter doing anything proactive. And it wasn't even that proactive. :(

Going backwards- mary_j_59 March 5 2009, 18:27:40 UTC

I haven't seen this movie, but all this is making me think how very advanced Hitchcock, of all people, was. 1930s Hitchcock! In the original Man Who Knew Too Much , the wife was a sharpshooter, and it was a little girl, not a little boy, who got kidnapped. That little girl, no more than 13 years old if that, got herself out a window in an attempt to escape her kidnappers. And it was her mother who shot the chief bad guy. In the 1950s, in the remake, the mother gets to sing and scream. (Not that there's anything wrong with singing, or even screaming, but you see what I mean!) And now? How can they be making such a regressive movie in the 21st century?

Re: Going backwards- horridporrid March 7 2009, 02:49:30 UTC

I saw a documentary a while back on women in movies... or maybe on women in general? Anyway, there was a section about the '30's and they showed how modern the women were in the movies, especially as compared to the '50's. An example I remembered was a group of working women at an office somewhere and a hot guy enters and they all notice and one of them whistles... it was both funny and cool.

And then it changed. And then it changed back (well, obviously it also took women further forward). And now? Well, I'm hopeful "Taken" was an anomaly rather than a trend.