Taken

You know the movie “Taken” where Liam Neeson gives the greatest tough guy speech in cinematic history? The “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want…I don’t have money but I have a particular set of skills…if you don’t (let my daughter go), I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.” speech? Well this is not that “Taken”. This “Taken” is about a woman (Becky played by Mary Lazarus) whose daughter, Kimberly, goes missing a few days after employing a maid and she plots a dangerous plan to rescue her daughter. Only problem is this “Taken” takes the worst part of “Taken” and makes it into a bad movie about all those horror stories you hear in the news about evil nannies. Ultimately, for a movie that was supposed to be a thriller, I was thrown off by how boring it was. So if you ever are in the market for a Taken thriller, stick to Neeson.

The movie starring Chelsea Eze, Mary Lazarus, Blessing Onwukwe, Uzor Arukwe and Taiwo Gasper and directed by Tope Alake gets more things wrong that it gets right leading to a film that was average at its best moments and ludicrous at its worst. Its biggest flaw has to be its non-existent, boring and baffling storyline which was all over the place. It somehow made a brief 1 hour 19 minutes feel like 3 hours and for a thriller does very little thrilling (for real, the movie had me laughing out loud during what was supposed to be a tense ransom call). It wasn’t helped by the uninspired to average performances all round by its cast, and the frankly off putting marital dynamic between its leads (although Mary Lazarus in full manic grief-stricken mama-bear mode during the kidnapping was fun to watch).

Finally, in the last half of the movie, Mary Lazarus goes full Neeson on us to find her daughter but at that point – due to the horrible pacing – the plot twists fell flat and I was just waiting for its end.