****
Taut thriller starring Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, ex-CIA operative, whose seventeen-year-old daughter is kidnapped while on a trip to Paris. He has 96 hours to find and rescue her before she disappears into the criminal underground forever. You’ve seen all this before, just generally flabbier and lazier. Here all the clichés and stereotypes of the genre are used to good purpose: to strip away the fat. What’s left is a lean, hard tale of a man with the skills to battle evil on its own turf and the uncompromising drive to do so. Neeson, who has to carry the plot, gives a terrific performance, imbuing Mills with an inner conviction to match his physical prowess. For all his cold-bloodedness, we never forget that Mills is exactly what he tells his daughter he was, when he worked for the CIA: a man who prevents bad things from happening.
Taut thriller starring Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, ex-CIA operative, whose seventeen-year-old daughter is kidnapped while on a trip to Paris. He has 96 hours to find and rescue her before she disappears into the criminal underground forever. You’ve seen all this before, just generally flabbier and lazier. Here all the clichés and stereotypes of the genre are used to good purpose: to strip away the fat. What’s left is a lean, hard tale of a man with the skills to battle evil on its own turf and the uncompromising drive to do so. Neeson, who has to carry the plot, gives a terrific performance, imbuing Mills with an inner conviction to match his physical prowess. For all his cold-bloodedness, we never forget that Mills is exactly what he tells his daughter he was, when he worked for the CIA: a man who prevents bad things from happening.
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