Anti-Rec: "Taken"

If you haven't already seen "Taken" with Liam Neeson, don't see it, it is awful.

The plot is "Damsel in Distress," and so it may as well be a video game plot. The hero's daughter is kidnapped and his quest is to get her back. Seriously, that's it-- the quest never widens out to anything like rescuing all the other young women also kidnapped by this gang, uncovering corruption, or confronting demons from the hero's past.

The damsel, Kim, is an object for the men to fight over and has little to no agency.

The supposed hero does really awful things like torturing someone. He also shoots a woman who is uninvolved in the kidnapping plot, in order to control her husband, and defends himself by saying "it's a flesh wound." More women as objects/property. Also, there are children in the house when this happens, but they mysteriously don't wake up?

I haven't even gotten to the racism and xenophobia yet. The sex rape traffickers are Albanians. The original danger for the daughter was leaving the States to go to... PARIS.

If you want to watch a better action movie with righteous violence, I recommend "Safe" instead.
aris_tgd: I feel like a Vorlon on its back--I can't get up and it's my fault! (amused at own stupidity)
[personal profile] aris_tgd2010-09-26 09:23 pm

Anti-Rec: War

War is one of those movies you're not quite sure how anyone could screw up. It stars Jet Li and Jason Statham, and they fight. How can you get that wrong? A certain percentage of the population wants to see Jet Li and Jason Statham in a movie where they beat each other up, and here it is! We present it to you!

And yet.

War is not a good movie. It's a disappointingly poorly plotted movie for several reasons I'll outline below, and on top of that it suffers from the same kind of systemic racism that most big-budget Hollywood movies do. Which is a shame, because it's star-billing one of China's greatest martial arts stars of the last thirty years, and it has a cast full of Asian and Asian-American actors. If it were a better movie, it would feel refreshing to see a movie more or less about the tense relations of two crime organizations in San Francisco, both operating across the Pacific Ocean; as it stands, it just feels like the titular war between the Triads and the Yakuza is just background for Statham's White Guy Man Pain.

Spoilers below the fold. )