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As former CIA agent Bryan Mills deals with a personal tragedy that shakes his world, he fights to overcome the incident and exact revenge.
When the first film in the “Taken” trilogy was released in 2009, it turned Liam Neeson into a bona fide action star. Not that Neeson wasn’t already a big name, with roles in such high-profile movies like “Schindler’s List,” “Batman Begins,” “Love Actually,” and “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” the actor was doing quite well for himself but “Taken” turned him into a leading action star. With Star Wars and Batman, he was part of a big ensemble alongside Christian Bale and Ewan McGregor but “Taken” proved that he had what it took to carry a film completely by himself. While both “Taken 2” and “Taken 3” were not on par with the original, they were still huge box office smashes and Mr. Neeson went on to lead other well-received action vehicles such as “The A-Team,” “Unknown,” “The Grey,” and “Non-Stop.” Because of the success of the “Taken” trilogy, I guess it was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea to turn “Taken” into a TV series. Had Mr. Neeson somehow managed to balance his film career with a TV one, and starred in the show, I’ve no doubt that it would have been a much bigger success but as it stands, the series goes back in time to when Neeson’s Bryan Mills character was much younger and how he started out working as a special intelligence operative.
Clive Standen (TV’s “Vikings”) takes on the Bryan Mills character in a modern-day origin story. As a former Green Beret, Mills is now a civilian and in the pilot episode, he is traveling with his younger sister Cali (Celeste Desjardins) when a small group of terrorists open fire on board their train. Mills informs Cali to keep out of sight and to lay low while he rushes off to disarm the bad guys but when he returns, he sees his sister lying dead on the floor, apparently caught in the crossfire. Fuelled by anger, he learns that the terrorists he killed on the train were not, in fact, random, as he originally thought, but were there to actually take the life of Mills’ sister. He discovers that they were working for Carlos Mejia (Romano Orzari), a Mexican terrorist and drug lord whose son he killed years earlier after he kidnapped a woman and held her hostage. Bryan manages to track down Mejia through an old acquaintance and surrenders to his men and just before Mejia is about to kill him, they are attacked by a small group of special operatives. Mejia is captured and Mills is injured and passes out.
When he wakes up, he meets Christina Hart (Jennifer Beals), the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, a secret organization who fight terrorism around the world. She tells Mills that after he killed the terrorists on the train, they began tracking him and learned that he used to be a Green Beret and she asks him to join her team. He agrees and once he’s back on his feet, his training commences but he, and Christina, quickly realize that his personal feelings over his sister’s death, keep getting in the way of the team’s objectives and he is ordered out of the field and assigned to desk support. Gradually, Christina allows him to become more involved with her team as Bryan manages to get a grip on his feelings and learns to stop making everything personal but shortly thereafter, Christina is informed by the FBI that Mejia is to be moved to a maximum security facility as the Mexican drug cartel that he owns, have somehow managed to locate him. She informs her team that they are assisting the FBI as backup only but when Bryan informs her that he has a bad feeling something is not right, she puts it down to his personal feelings about the prisoner and ignores him. Later, when their convoy is ambushed and Mejia escapes, Bryan, already anticipating the attack, sets his plan into motion and follows Mejia into Mexico, where he plans to kill him, once and for all.
“Taken: Season One” is a show that I personally, upon word of its inception back in 2015, wasn’t too keen on but Clive Standen manages to infuse the Bryan Mills character we have all come to love and admire through the movie trilogy, with a backstory and motivation that actually makes you watch the films a lot more differently. While Neeson’s “I will find you, I will kill you” dialogue has been lampooned in numerous other films and TV shows, Clive Standen’s iteration has a similar phrase that he uses near the end of the show and upon hearing it, actually gave me goosebumps. It is not the word-for-word phrase spoken in the movie but it closely resembles it and Standen successfully makes it work. In the end, I feel that the world could have done without a TV series that introduces us to a much younger Bryan Mills, after all, the character, when we meet him in the first film, is very secretive and not knowing much about his past actually makes him even more compelling but the show wants you to know what makes him who he is. And for the most part, it succeeds. With NBC having renewed it for a second season, I’ll be tuned in to see where it goes from here.
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