movie review - Taken
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This is a story about a semi-retired Cold War spy whose daughter is kidnapped along with a friend while traveling in Europe. The central character is paranoid from a life-time of danger and mistrust, and his relationship with his re-married ex-wife is not strong. He is depicted as having intruded on the lives of his wife's new family by investigating her new husband to some extent. But when the girl is gone and the spy turns up a lead in mere hours, the spy immediately obtains the support the girl's step-father and at this point a very promising story is set up. Can this spy use the skills and a half-buried network from a long career in Europe to rescue his daughter? Will the step-father's considerable financial resources carry the mission? I could see a potential script in which a network of favors owed and past alliances work in the spy's favor and its literally intelligence that gets the job done. He even says, when speaking with the kidnapper, "I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."
Instead we get a clunky action movie starring a man in his mid-fifties.
This could have been a fascinating story of intelligence tradecraft. Not recommended.