Side post: Taken

I didn't say anything about it in the last post, but after a few minutes of considering I changed my mind:

Taken will rock your nuts off.

Seriously. Even if you don't have nuts. It's what we all wanted Bourne 2 and 3 to be. Liam Neeson plays a badass ex-spy, who has lots of badass ex-spy friends and does lots of awesome badass things like work as a bodyguard part-time. And then his daughter gets kidnapped -- and if you had any reservations about Neeson in this role, they vanish during that scene. He tells the kidnappers he's going to kill them, and you get the sense he is telling the effing truth.

Which he is, since he proceeds to kill more people than you've met in the last decade or so.

The movie excels where so many others have failed in the last year or two: Bourne was quick and fun, but a little hackneyed and known for inducing motion sickness. Even Bond couldn't find his own plot in Quantum of Solace, instead cobbling together a loose "look how green and modern we are" environment with a "look how much like Ian Fleming we are" situation. It was an imitation, albeit a decent one. High quality SPAM cinema.

But Taken succeeds in spades. To minimize spoiling things I won't say much more about it, except that it grabs you by the Jonesboys from the second the action starts and doesn't let go until it's good and ready. Originally a foreign release, it appears Neeson -- a dude less than six months younger than my Dad -- has collected US profits topping 80 million in just about two and a half weeks. Way to go, Qui-Gonn.