This is reprinted with my Brother’s permission. I copied it from an email exchange we had. Names have been changed to protect the innocen… err me.
"A) Liam Neeson is more Jack Bauer than Jack Bauer. He’s a better Jack Bauer than Jack Bauer, or Kiefer Sutherland.
B) It seems like I’ve seen the character Amanda in about a million movies over the course of my life. You know: the slightly slutty blond best friend of the good girl in the movie. She’s the pottymouthed naughtress who pushes the good girl she’s incongruously friends with to “live a little,” to “just relax,” to “don’t be such a pill” or to “stop being a downer all the time,” and so encourages the good girl to throw a house party, break curfew, sneak out of her room, wear the dress that leaves nothing to the imagination, get drunk, get high, lose her virginity, etc. So seeing this girl in this movie and recognizing her for what she was absolutely instantly, I thought a couple of things:
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She was, of course, totally gonna be dead meat, and Liam Neeson would find her first.
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Is there a categorical name for this instantly-recognizable archetype? Could we come up with one?
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Scylla will be spending the next 15 years of his life looking to detect the faintest whiff of this archetype among his daughter’s friends.
C) Liam Neeson’s old assassin buddies come over for a guy’s night of “red wine and red meat.” Who does this? Who drinks red wine with their buddies instead of beer?
This struck me as totally the most unrealistic part of the movie.
D) When Liam Neeson tells his daughter he was “a preventer,” if I was the daughter, I would have said “That’s neat, but ‘preventer,’ that’s really…well, I mean, that’s kind of an awkward and clumsy construction and not very romantic-sounding or sleek and cool euphemism, don’t you think? ‘A preventer’ sort of sounds like the name for the designated special teams player in football whose job is to run up the backs of his teammates to block an extra point.”
E) I was really glad when that guy Peter or Piotr got hit by a truck running away from Neeson. He had that look, exactly the kind of pretty boy look, with the great mass of dark hair and olive skin and the sort of dark skinned deeply romantic or romanesque features, that I hated in high school and college. Girls really do go for this kind of guy’s look (you might keep that in mind for future reference), even though the guy who looks this way is invariably short and a total pussy in a fight. I remember a soccer player (of course) named Anthony who looked just like that. Girls just loved him. I just automatically hated the guy, and I think all real guys automatically hate that kind of guy, and he was a total, total pussy, and of course he got all kinds of sex.
F) In the scene where Neeson went into the construction trailers, ended up shattering about five guys’ femurs and forearms and skulls with all kinds of wicked-fast moves and shooting three or four of them like that and taking that one girl out of there, I don’t think if I worked there I would have given chase in quite so committed a way as those guys did. I mean, they really went after him, like in six cars. I think I might’ve been like, “Yeah, get him!” But I’d have hung back a little. I mean, I don’t even know this guy. And look what he did to all of us. Why am I chasing him? Because he took one girl?
G) I liked that he shot the wife. Jack Bauer did it first, but still. I think it would have been better if the guy was a single dad (like had a nanny or something–don’t the French all have nannies?), found Liam Neeson there, they had red wine and red meat and then Liam shot one of the kids in the arm. If they could have pulled that off, it would have been great, but of course, no producer or studio head in Hollywood would ever have allowed such a scene because shooting a kid supposedly makes you “too unsympathetic.” What nonsense. I think you could do it without making us turn on Neeson. He’s a good enough actor to do it. I mean, he’s like this 6’5 towering badass Irishman with all kinds of presence. And in this movie, he was able to convincingly play this weird, nebbishy, creepily haggling wimpy John in the prostitute corner scene. More than that, he was able to convincingly play his badass character playing that character convincingly in the context of the movie, if you follow me. Like, we could believe that the people in the movie would believe that he was that creepy/wimpy John instead of, like, a preventer, and we could believe that his character would have been a good enough actor to do it. Not easy. So I think Neeson could have pulled it off.
H) Speaking of Bauer, did you notice Xander Berkely in this movie? Jack’s old boss George Mason. I liked the fact that he wasn’t behind it all. That would have been so easy.
I) Famke Janssen is really not hot anymore and in fact, hasn’t been since Made or maybe the first X-Men. If you look her up, you’ll find out she’s surprisingly old. Were we really supposed to believe she was in her twenties in X-Men?
J) You really need to get one of those suitcases he had with all the recording devices and what not for cell phones. You’re going to need one. Also: You need to develop and rehearse a speech like the one he gave. “Listen to me very carefully. My name is Scylla. So, uh…” isn’t going to cut it.
(Speaking of cell phones, he went through about two dozen cell phones in this movie. He was handing them out and tossing them and leaving them behind for the bad guys to find and using them remotely and breaking them like cell phone subscriptions cost nothing. He must have had a deal with Nokia.)
K) After hearing that speech, if I was the guy on the other end of the line, I would have thought about it. I mean, I would have seriously thought about just doing what Neeson said and letting the daughter go, moving on to the next one. I mean, I really would have. I probably wouldn’t have, but I’d have wanted to. You know?
And then later when Liam Neeson showed up and found me out with that tricky “Good luck” business and then said, “I told you I would find you” – well, that would have been the absolute worst. I live my life in fear of moments like that, where I don’t listen to my gut, where I intellectualize away what I know I should do, where I convince myself that the bad feeling I’m getting isn’t happening or isn’t relevent, and then later it turns out my gut was right. About two times in my life, I have had this feeling in the airport, where I’m waiting to get on an airplane or I’m even walking down the ramp, and I just know it’s going to crash. Something in my gut is writhing and screaming and saying: “Don’t get on. Don’t. Stopstopstop. Just get out of line, turn around, go to the desk, and try to get the next one. Or the one after that. Or just walk out of the terminal, go home, skip it completely. Yes, it will cost you a lot of money, but this plane is going to crash, so, uhhh, it’s worth it, right?” You hear about people having this feeling and listening to it and then the plane does go down, right? But both times, I squelched it down with my reason and talked myself out of it and then I sat there white-knuckling the whole flight. And I always thought the worst part about the plane crashing wouldn’t be dying or even ending up on some strange island with Matthew Fox, but instead sitting there as the plane spiralled in and knowing that, Dammit, I knew it, I knew I should have listened to my gut. For me, that would be worse than the actual crashing part.
I think that the same horrible regret would be in operation here, when Neeson showed up. I’d be sitting at that table like, Awww, jeez, you know, I had a feeling…
L) I think there could be a sequel. Someone kills off all his buddies one by one in the opening credits. Like, one guy gets shot by the garbage men when he goes to get his morning paper out of the drive. Another one is retired, changed jobs, become a car salesman, and then this sinister-looking customer test drives a car by running over him and crashing through the window. Another gets in his fishing boat and it blows up as he’s heading out the dock.
Then someone, they take his daughter, again, like some old enemy of Neeson’s, like some evil former dictator from some South or Central American country, a dictator Neeson helped overthrow, this guy, he blackmails Neeson to do a job for him, like maybe assassinate the guy Neeson helped install in his place. And it turns out that one of his men he used to eat red meat and drink red wine with who he thought was dead–the guy blown up in the boat–isn’t dead at all but is actually helping this evil former dictator. So/But/And Neeson only pretends he’s going to do it and instead, he kills the guy they’ve assigned to escort him on the plane to the South or Central American country to assassinate the rightful president and then he jumps out of the plane into a swamp and starts following the trail eventually all the way to an island where they’ve squirrelled his daughter and where he kills everyone after taking refuge in a gardener’s shack filled with all kinds of tools he improvises into lethal edged weapons. In the end, he confronts the man from his unit who betrayed him, kills him with a steam pipe he rips out of the ceiling and throws like a javelin, and saves his daughter.
M) Did you notice that the daughter had a real BIG ASS that they tried to cover up? I mean, she was skinny, but she had this disproportionately huge ass – like “a great big fat person” ass. It was weird. The filmmakers were clearly aware of it, too. They took a lot of steps to hide it with strangle angles, her posture, clothing choices (like the strange, ass-covering robe she wore when she was on sale).
N) I was glad to see that the movie didn’t shy away from employing what is really the ugliest of colonial stereotypes: the corrupt, corpulent, black-eyed, sinister lip-licking Easterner who can’t wait to get his hands on all the white virgins he can, to deflower and debase them. I was glad that there was absolutely no politically correct hesitation in this regard. It actually made the movie go up in my estimation.
O) I like that he just shot that guy, the Sheikh. The guy said “We can make–” and Neeson, he just shot him, like “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen this part of the movie before, where you say ‘We can make a deal!’ and I say ‘Let my daughter go!’ and you sort of toy with the knife at her throat and say something lecherous or, like, blow in her ear or lick her cheek and she says ‘Daddy!’ and I say ‘I’m here, baby! I’m here! It’s going to be all right!’ and you say ‘Put your gun on the floor and take two steps back or the girl dies!’ and I hesitate at first but you dig the point of the knife into her throat and she screams and I say ‘Okay, okay! Don’t hurt her!’ and I start to put the gun down or I do put it down but then she elbows you in the gut and breaks away and I pick up the gun real quick and shoot you twice or a half-dozen times but since we’ve all seen that ending let’s just skip all the preliminaries and cut to the chase so I’m going to shoot you right now, one shot in the head and… scene.”
P) If all this, like, happened? I guess as a father, you’d pretty much have hand for the rest of your daughter’s life. You’d be at the beach or something and she’d be like, “I want to go swimming.” And you’d be able to say, “No.” And she’d say, “Why not?” And you could say, “Sharks.” And she’d say “Sharks? Don’t be ridiculous.” And you’d say “Ridiculous, how? Oh, you mean ridiculous like when I didn’t think it was safe for you to go to Paris and the only reason I relented was because you lied to me about what you were going to be doing there and you ended up being kidnapped by Eastern European slavers and sold to a Sheikh and I had to come get you? You mean ridiculous like that?”
Q) I liked that scene where the guy Patrice St. Claire or whatever was backed up in the elevator and said “It was just business. Nothing personal.” And Neeson said “It is personal, to me” and shot him. It was like the scene where he shot the Sheikh–I always wondered why, in movies, you don’t just shoot them when people try to go down that road. Like: blam. In movies, somebody is always saying “It’s strictly business” and “Nothing personal” after they’ve screwed you over. You know, I really don’t buy that as an excuse.
R) It reminds me of another scene that always happens. Adam Corolla (used to be of the Man Show) talked some about this during a Bill Simmons “Sports Guy” Podcast a few months ago. It’s the scene where the one character says “We need to go back! We don’t have to do this! It’s not too late to stop!” and the other character says: “It’s already too late” or “We can’t ever go back.” And then they keep doing what they’re doing. Invariably, if you look at those scenes, if you step out and really look at them and analyze the situation realistically, you’ll realize it’s not too late, they could just stop, they could just go back…
The first guy should take another sip of beer, think about it for a minute, then say “You know, no, actually, it’s not too late. I’m going back. See you.”
S) The daughter actually had a denim jacket that had clearly been Bedazzled. I thought that was funny.
T) Why didn’t Neeson just follow his daughter to Paris, and follow her around without her knowledge? It wasn’t like he had anything else to do. This was made very clear: he was basically basing his whole existence around her. He said he could be “invisible, so you’d never even know I was there.” I think his character would have done that, and employed his red wine and red meat buddies to help him monitor her. Don’t you?
U) If my daughter showed up for that lunch where I had the contact info for a famous pop singer and a banana raspberry milkshake all ready for her and it was supposed to be just the two of us for the first time and instead she brought my bitch of an ex-wife along with her to give me the hard sell on letting her go to Paris, I would have said: “I would have been more inclined to sign this paper if you had demonstrated enough maturity to simply ask me by yourself and to make your own argument on why you are an adult and should be allowed to go instead of ambushing me with your mother’s presence and relying on her to press and manipulate me into signing this paper by playing us off each other to get what you want. That is how a child behaves, how a child goes about getting what it wants and so you are still, clearly, a child. And so the answer is no.”
V) If she stormed out then, I would have called out after her “I drink your milkshake! I drink it all up!” And then I would have drank it.
W) She wants to be a singer? In a Bedazzled jacket, with that big ass, and a Mister Microphone from her dad? Not bloody likely.
X) When they got off the plane at the end and Famke Janssen hugged Liam Neeson for getting their daughter back and said tenderly, “Thank you,” I think it would have been cool if, instead of simply the expected, silent masculine nod like the one he gave, he had said, “No problemo.”
Y) I liked the fact that the Brittney Spears character was actually kind of cool, instead of the stereotypical diva. But she was really kind of dumpy for a pop star dancer/singer. And I didn’t understand exactly why that guy tried to knife her backstage. What was that guy trying to accomplish? And, uh, how exactly did he get in front of them?
Z) While I don’t doubt your desire or determination, I don’t know that you could have pulled off everything the Neeson character did if someone took your daughter from a Paris apartment. In fact, I think you would have trouble with the very first thing he did: going out on the ledge of the building and breaking in through the window. You don’t like heights. I think there’s at least a 50 percent chance you would have fallen and… that would have been the movie.
Nothing personal.
(I would like to point out that he didn’t really need to do that if he was just going to break the window. Why not just break open the door? Or pick the lock? You telling me all the things a preventer can do, he can’t pick a lock or kick a door open? I really didn’t understand the necessity of the ledge scene.)
Don’t feel too bad. I would have fallen, no doubt. In fact, I wouldn’t have even tried. Or if I’d have got out there, I would have moved my foot a couple of inches, then decided against it and headed back. And if a voice in my head said “It’s too late. You can’t ever go back,” I would have said “Shut up. Of course I can. Look, I’ve only gone a half-inch. There. I’m back.”
Then again, I probably never would have gotten on the flight to go after her in Paris in the first place…"
