![]() Mills had only recently given up his government career as what he calls, a “preventer” – “I prevented bad things from happenings,” he says – to be near Kim, who lives with Bryan’s ex-wife Lenore and her new husband. With these chilling words to a member of a band of kidnappers, former government operative Bryan Mills begins the longest 96-hours of his life – and the hunt for the fearsome organization that has taken his daughter Kim. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you. ![]() I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills acquired over a very long career in the shadows, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you’re looking for a ransom, I can tell you, I don’t have money. It's not so great that it deserved two sequels, maybe.“I don’t know you who you are. The fact that the Taken speech happens to be an action movie shouldn't disguise its perfect craftsmanship. The reasons the Taken speech works so incredibly well, the reasons everyone remembers it, are the same reasons that people remember other great speeches: These rhetorical structures are built into the substructures of our consciousness and always work. And yet the way of speaking-the technique-is exactly the same. Churchill and MLK spoke while facing desperate moments of public reckoning, Liam Neeson while beginning the second act of a middling international action movie. They are also delivered unbelievably slowly. They combine the abstract ("particular set of skills," "growing confidence and growing strength," "the Lord shall be revealed") with physical details ("I will find you and I will kill you," "we shall fight in the hills," "little black boys and black girls"). The speeches are very simply expressed, with almost no big words. Those phrases are predictive spoken in the future tense. The speakers repeat phrases ("I will," "We shall," "I have a dream"). These speeches are incredibly similar even though the situations from which they emerge could not be more different. And it follows the same structure and uses the same techniques as two of the greatest speeches of the 20th century, albeit ones much more important than what's found in a popcorn flick: Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches"and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream." It was a classically structured piece of rhetoric, a Tarantino-style soliloquy but drained of comedy. Still, the speech from the original Taken (2008) was brilliant, and it was brilliant in a way almost never seen in the movies. By this point, the Secret Service would have been called out. ![]() With this weekend's Taken 3, the absurdity of the films' repetition has passed a new threshold. At least Ford's thrillers from the 1990s bothered to come up with separate plots and characters. Liam Neeson has largely taken over from Harrison Ford in the "family in jeopardy" genre on the strength of that single scene. It's one of few films whose fans quote not just lines but whole blocks of text from the script. Taken is the rare case of a movie franchise that has grown out of a single speech. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you." If you let my daughter go now that'll be the end of it. ![]() Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills.
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