A brilliant film that helped define a genre

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Even Though this film would not be classified as a horror movie, people who enjoyed the original video nasties of the 80's might enjoy this too. On one level I was thinking about the Texas chainsaw massacre and how the remake creates leatherface as an anti-hero. What seems to be lacking in many horror remakes is the ability to pick on, and demonize minority groups and a large dose of misogyny. This film manages this. The idea of casting howard marks, is effective as exploitation cinema in the best possible way, it adds an authenticity to any criminal elements that many develop later in the film.I can see a connection with this film and 'taken' but the dialogue is very poor. Saying that the pacing is good, the plot unfolds at exciting pace. it is not bad as a horror/thriller.

I am a big fan of Taken, and so is the writer of this film! Except while one expects people to take inspiration from previous works to help them tell a story, this one just ends up being something of a crappy movie you see on TV once when you have nothing better to do.The opening premise makes you think "Well, this might actually have something to offer." At the very least I expected some nice eye candy to look at or maybe even some mindless action. Hell obviously this isn't going to be something classic like the Godfather or Citizen Kane but at least try to make the movie worth watching.The plot is as dumb as a bag of rocks. The characters are even dumber.I'll put the spoiler alert up at this point. Though I think you'd thank me if I didn't.***SPOILERS*** -If your girlfriend doesn't care about money and other things, why the hell would she care about what you look like when you're "old and fat"? That's a rather contradictory and shallow move. Sounds like she a shallow bitch to me.-Wouldn't it concern said girlfriend if you arrive in Spain and are greeted by a servant, a gorgeous house, and an absent father who allows you to screw on his bed while he's away? I mean any sane woman I know would view this as troubling at least.-If you arrive a club that is obviously seedy and are offered an unknown drug after your valet warns you not to use a cab, wouldn't you avoid the drugs at least? I mean that's just common sense. It's being safe not to take drugs when in a strange land that you are completely new to.-Bumbling around a town trying to find your girlfriend and messing with a guy who is armed and dangerous is apparently the way to do things. And this guy apparently has a degree. In what? Communications or Art Philosophy? It'd sort of redeem the film if he had some skills that actually worked to his advantage. Otherwise he just whines like a little bitch to his daddy and a cop who is being completely reasonable.-The mantra of the film is really stupid. If the moments that define a man happen when he's not in the area, then they aren't his defining moments. That's just trying to sound like some sort of Nick Cage line that falls even flatter than Cage's acting.In Taken we can suspend our disbelief relatively easily. It's not going to be some high-brow film but a simple action movie that covers things nicely. Even the few plot holes can be justified or overlooked because the story trots along nicely. We came to see Liam Neeson be awesome and shoot up bad men, not be a simpering wimp who meanders along the streets of a Spanish town.

Watching the first 5 minutes of this movie, you might think it was a dark comedy, but the comedy quickly vanishes and it becomes a predictable movie that then becomes a confused wreck.There is a lot of nudity and a lot of implied sex scenes. There's some blood Some shooting Some cursing Sadly, the plot needed a little help. This had promise, and could have been a good movie, but no...it's notSpoilers:So the main character was born to a boxer and an average woman; we see through flashback that the guy's dad was a womanizer and his parents separated. He wished to be everything his Dad wasn't. Okay, I'll follow with this. Then we learn that the main character has hooked a hottie, who all we know about her is that she is a great girl to take to bed as we see snippets of her and him going at it...nothing more. Nothing about her is ever explained. He does explain that in order to keep her, he proposes to her. One day, she says she wants to know what he will look like when he is old and fat, so he decides to take her to see his Dad in southern Spain. Meanwhile, he loses his job and worries about losing her. So they arrive in Spain and get to hang out at his Dad's house (he is working - which we later see, work is a courier for cocaine dealers). Anyway, they decide to go out one night to a swanky/seedy club where you just know something is going to happen. She throws out that his fiancé is the son of the boxer and this apparently gets them admission and special treatment at the club, including the shady club owner giving them both a pill. Now at this point, what would any normal person do? Take the pill from a guy you know nothing about and only met 2 minutes ago, or would you not take the pill? Sorry, I just lose sympathy for characters when their dumb decision- making process is the root of the entire plot.Anyway, long story short, he loses track of the girl and there's a thin attempt by the plot makers to make it seem like a giant conspiracy - the club owner, people at the club all pretend that they never saw his girl. That plot point disappears quickly though.The guy ambles around southern Spain and just happens to find people who were at the club that night. It just so happens that one of the guys had a sister kidnapped as well.We learn that the kidnapper is the "White Arab," a Russian who converted to Islam to escape an Iraqi prison and now owns a yacht where he has a harem of other kidnapped women who serve as his sex-slaves. I know what you're thinking, "I've seen this movie, except it was called Taken." Well, the main character is hardly a bad-ass. Far from it. When he enlists the help of the guy who had a sister kidnapped, that guy does all the shooting, including taking down the Russian. There's some plot line about his Dad becoming a good man and trying to save the girl but the main character gets confused and ends up beating him up...at this point, you don't care though.

There's a lot not to like about this movie. It is advertised as an exploitation movie, but it resembles the exploitation movies of the 1970's, just enough sex and violence to cover a two minute trailer. It also tries, but mostly fails to give the lead character much depth and realism.That said, it does a couple of things nicely. We do care about the lead female character and we do feel fear and concern when she is "taken." (Did "Taken" copy the phrase from this movie which was two years earlier?) Also, we do feel a sense of despair for the plight of the lead male character, who is helpless, but not really stupid (until near the end). There is some originally in the plotting, For example, the villain is a psychopathic Russian Muslim convert who doesn't kill people during the Ramadam fasting month. Tell me where you have seen that before? The cinematography and editing are commercially slick. It is nicely done for an ultra-low budget movie like this.One can't blame the filmmakers for disguising the film as an exploitation flick. A more honest description would be "an Albert Camus inspired existentialist meditation on the difficulty of holding onto love in the postmodern capitalist world." Probably, nobody would have seen it if they had advertised the film this way.