TAKEN …. at a basketball game!
I’ve always appreciated any made-for-TV movie that’s absolutely shameless about ripping off a big budget feature film and, as such, I did appreciate the chutzpah of Taken At A Basketball Game. I mean the word “TAKEN” is right there in the title! D.B. Woodside plays Wayne Edwards, an ex-cop who is now the head of security for a casino. Wayne is haunted by a shooting that left an innocent girl dead. Wayne is also middle-aged and struggling to relate to his teenage daughter, Robyn (Claire Qute). When Robyn is abducted by sex traffickers at a basketball game, Wayne sets out to track her down and rescue her. It probably will not surprise you to hear that there’s a scene where Wayne explains that, even before he was a cop, he was a member of Special Forces and, as such, he knows how to get information out of people.
That said, it’s been quite a while since Taken was first released. The first film came out in 2008 and it can be somewhat surprising to remember how excited everyone was about it. At that time, Liam Neeson was best-known for appearing in prestige pictures so there was something enjoyably subversive about him playing a relentless torturer on a mission. A lot of people were also under the impression that Taken was based on a true story. A sequel followed in 2012 and, by that point, people were much more used to the idea of Liam Neeson killing people. The third (and, to date, final) Taken film came out in 2015 and no one really cared. There was a television series that sputtered along for two seasons. There were countless Taken rip-offs, many of which starred Nissan himself. The initial cultural footprint of Taken was huge but, by the start of the 2020s, it had pretty much evaporated. Taken At A Basketball Game comes out at a time when even Liam Neeson has started parodying his image.
This is my long-winded way of saying that Taken At A Basketball Game would probably have worked better as a parody than a straight action film. At this point, whenever an actor starts to give a monologue about how he’s been given very special training, it’s hard not to laugh because it’s a scene that has shown up in so many movies that it’s basically been done to death. Everyone thinks that they can do a perfect impersonation of Liam Neeson reciting the Taken speech. Of course, what originally sold the speech in 2008 was that Neeson delivered it with an intensity and a commitment that kept it from sounding like a bunch of empty boasts. Listening to Neeson in that first film, you sincerely believed that he could and would kill someone if he felt like it. D.B. Woodside, who is probably best-known for playing the less interesting of 24‘s two President Palmers, comes across as being a bit too mild-mannered to give a convincing “I’ve been trained to inflict pain” speech. For most of the film, he seems like he’d rather just go back to his office and maybe sell someone some insurance.
The other problem with Taken At A Basketball Game is that very little of it actually takes place at the basketball game. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of basketball. Those squeaky shoes give me a migraine. But the stadium was a good location and it’s easy to imagine a fairly entertaining film could have been made out of Woodside spending 90 minutes running from one level to another, searching for his daughter and fighting off various bad guys. (Yes, I realize this would have made the film into a Die Hard rip-off instead of a Taken rip-off but Die Hard rip-offs still work whereas Taken reached its expiration date years ago.) Instead, the film abandoned the game early on and just went through the motions for the remainder of its running time.
Oh well. Maybe Liam Neeson will make a basketball movie someday….
Through the Shattered Lens 