Americans shouldn't go to foreign countries because they'll kidnap white people and sell them into bondage.

This matured cheese smelt pure 2008. Bad Algerians whoops I mean Albanians !(r there any good ones). Partying loose girl pays for her badness! Patriotric speech by an Irish dude playing an American in France to an Albanian/Algerian ! Torturing like back in the good ole U S of Gitmo ! Fat arab dude lusting over "pure" white girl !

Less crap than Leeson/Besson other warm offerings.

On my bookshelf is a small collection of dvds acquired on sale at blockbuster. They are all so bad I never watch them, except for one: The Professional.

Besson certainly knows how to make quality garbage. Maybe Taken deserves a place on my bookshelf, too.

...why is this movie just now opening here? It opened in most of Europe a year ago.

The only thing Luc Besson has demonstrated is that he is as good as Americans at making flashy but braind-dead action movies. "Hyperkinetic" describes his films well, but so does "lowbrow."

Blech.

AFter re-reading (in the Salon archives) Charles Taylor's 3 (densely written) pages about Luc Besson's "The Messenger, The Story of Joan of Arc," I was left wondering what had happened to Salon. These pages brought back what had once been so wonderful about Salon - a big, fat review of a film that was terrible. Now we can't even get a substantive review about a film that is good, let alone a film that is terrible. I am left wondering what this review is actually about, and I wonder why this review was even written. The need to fill a blank page? Very sad.

Some of us like 'Nikita', 'Leon' and 'The Fifth Element' in all their semi-trashy glory. Besides, how can you not enjoy the introduction of acid-toting Jean Reno in Nikita: "Victor. Nettoyeur."

I don't believe anyone can make that line work, not least Neeson whose range is inverse to his size. And despite that size, he's too lumbering to take on six thugs at a time, unlike Jason Statham in the Transporter movies who makes such sceens a cross between ballet and a joke. I'll watch this on DVD, perhaps, for the cheap trip to Paris, but maybe not, given the scathingly funny drubbing it got in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/02/02/090202crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=2

Some people probably think "Bridal Wars" is the best comedy ever made, but then, I've enjoyed some horror movies that would get me kicked out of the Film Snob Society if they ever found out. Some people like you enjoy Luc Besson's output. To each their own.

It's still trash, though.

First let me say that I adore Stephanie Zaccharek's reviews. It's the perfect critic-reader relationship: If she likes a movie, I usually will too, and for the same reasons. This is true whether I read the review before seeing the movie or the other way around. Often after seeing a film I check the IMDB and click on the external reviews link, and more often than not- in fact virtually every time, Zacharek's take on the film was very close to what mine had been.

Ahem.

Well, to every rule there are exceptions I guess, and boy oh boy is this one of them. My friends in France, where I live most of the time, see Luc Besson as a joke. For very, very good reasons.

Maybe it's a sort of reverse Jerry Lewis thing, who knows.

Liam Neeson is sort of like Stephanie for me: A truly terrific talent who was simply awful in this case. Actually, he did as well as he could, it was just such a horrifically bad, cliche-ridden, improbable, ridiculously contrived string of nonsense.

Let's hire an Albanian translator to show up in the middle of the night and sit in my car because I just before that got roughed up by an Albanian pimp who didn't hurt me but only demanded money, as I planned you see, so that I could plant a bug on him so that by the most astounding coincidence he would, in the next few seconds after leaving me, have a conversation that included mentioning the whereabouts of my daughter who'd been kidnapped a few days before. And the Albanian could translate, you see.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

I do think it must be cultural, I mean imagine someone stringing together an equivalent series of cliches, racist stereotypes, sexist stereotypes, about some American city, punctuated by meaningless violence that's all somehow excused because everyone who gets wasted is just some low-life immigrant. That's okay though, because we're also shown gratuitous shots of former high school beauty queen types dead from forced overdoses--- and on and on. You can imagine the rest.

One thing is certain if such a film were made: Stephanie Zacharek wouldn't even review it, let alone start heaping giggly praise on it like this.

I'll continue to read and enjoy Stephanie's work and use it as an oh so useful guide to what I might like to see, but in this particular case I prefer the review that another commenter put above, and I quote:

"blech."

That, in this case, says it perfectly.

Certainly not a criticism of Stephanie, but once again the headline moron strikes.

Any cinemaphile will have recognized that extraneous "r" with a hoot of derision. Do you really not know the difference clueless Salon headline writer? How dare you embarass Stephanie by confusing this twit Luc with the master Robert!

Er... sorta misquoted the offending headline (the one over in the sidebar at the top of the page). But there it is... that insulting "r". What are you trying to do? Cause an international incident?

Yes, this movie is pure revenge fantasy action hero craziness, but it's highly entertaining in that vein.

If you have problems engaging your suspension of disbelief then this movie is not the one for you. The way Neeson's character connects the dots as he tries to find his daughter is a bit implausible to say the least. In general the point though is not really about how the dots get connected it's about how much can Neeson's character kick ass. Suffice to to say he does a lot of ass kicking.

It's definitely not a thinking person's picture.

I'll admit that I'm a fan of several Luc Besson films including The Professional and The Fifth Element so take all this with a grain of salt.