Entries for February 2009

On the surface, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" did little to interest me. A story of two women falling in love with the same man while spending the summer in an exotic locale (Barcelona, Spain in this case) sounds like it's treading pretty typical romantic comedy territory. The nondescript name — I wouldn't name a movie "Joel David Boise," for example — probably won't draw a lot of people in, either.

One would think a movie in which a father is frantically trying to prevent his kidnapped teenage daughter from being sold into an underground sex worker network in Eastern Europe would be willing to take some chances. If one made this assumption about "Taken," the fast-paced, justice-seeking thriller starring Liam Neeson, one would be wrong. "Taken" somehow manages the difficult task of being both completely exciting and utterly boring. It's exciting because of the drastic and desperate measures a father is willing to take to get his daughter back from a group of rotten human beings, and boring because it plays out exactly like you'd expect it to. The story doesn't take any chances in becoming any better than it already is, although there would have been plenty of opportunity for "Taken" to become more than a cat-and-mouse game.