Kennebec Journal: Academic Karmis And The Bhagavad-Gita

[suchandra 1]

Since the karmi's desire is nothing but to live forever in a material body and enjoy sensual/mental pleasures, they feel horrofied when Bhagavad-gita says:

 

'Taken' 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' -- The Bhagavad Gita

 

02/05/2009

http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/happening/stories/5904068.html

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is a man with two sides -- a retired veteran after 24 years with the CIA, a deep black ops expert so skilled that he was on every president's speed dial. The other is that of a hypersensitive father who adores his daughter and sweetly shows up for her 17th birthday with a Karaoke box because she still dreams of becoming a singer. We know at once that a mensch lives here.Mills has moved back to Los Angeles, which he hates, from years of "disappearing" into the smoke, just to be near his daughter, Kim (played by a sweet and convincing Maggie Grace) who now lives with his ex-wife Lenore (a dark, syrupy Famke Janssen.)

Lenore is remarried to a business world mover, a good man of generous excess with twice the money of Warren Buffet (Xander Berkeley). Mills' world now seems to have shrunken to weekly barbecues and card nights with old op buddies, and the occasional personal protection gig.

The rest of his time he seems to spend worrying obsessively about his daughter's safety, even as she lives in a gated world of expensive protection. He is a man who knows the true power of seemingly safe shadows.

When Kim announces her upcoming trip to Paris, a high school graduation gift from rich step-daddy, Mills is against it, and she needs his permission to leave the country. Reluctantly, he gives it, and off she goes with a less stable ditzy friend, Amanda (Katie Cassidy).

Hours after arriving and moving into the entire fifth floor of a posh Paris hotel, the cute young man who shared a cab with them from the airport turns up with a band of Albanian buddies who are into abducting young women for a high scale billion-dollar white slavery market. Kim makes a desperate last second cell call to Mills before they come for her and knowing what will happen next, he calmly gives her instructions to save her life. Then she is gone and the movie begins.

Using rich new daddy's wealth and private jet, and the inside CIA help of his friends, Mills is off to Europe to find her. He is told he has a 95-hour window, after which time she will be sold and will disappear into the Middle East forever. Pierre Morel and his writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen give us a fun, bumpy, scary Jason Bourne/James Bond trip through the City Of Lights. This is the new-world Paris of Albanian slave traders, Russian gangsters and wealthy mideastern potentates. It is a Paris Gene Kelly never danced in, that "Gigi" never knew and bears no resemblance to any Lautrec poster. All the agencies of the world nest here, like dormant scorpions in various states of bipartisan cooperation and ruthless corruption. It is a world Mills knows well.

As things thicken and the plot seeps out like smoke from under a door, we learn just how good Mills was at being bad. Mills is Jason Bourne as middle-aged warrior. He is a dark Wyatt Earp, and around every corner there is an OK Coral. Mills knows how to kill with a pencil or the corner of a rug. He can cripple and torture, hot wire cars and deal death like a card sharp. He is who the great physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer once spoke of when he said, "Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it."

On the day his daughter is taken, Mills promises her he will find her, and to her abductors, who have her phone, he warns: "I have 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. I will look for you, I will find you. And I will kill you."

He keeps his promise. Morel asks us to take "Taken" for what it is, both an action thriller of the highest caliber and a fairy tale for popcorn dreams. It is full of predictable lurches and seemingly impossible leaps into the absurd. But somehow we buy it. We buy it, and Mills, because since 9/11, we find ourselves in a nightmare world where the footing is shaky; a world where we go through our days holding on, afraid to look down. Mills, like Bourne and Bond, give us a feeling, even for an hour or two, that they or someone very much like them is out there in the dark watching our back.

Neeson, a good actor who rarely gets to play such a character, walks the walk with confidence. Despite the fragility of super hero tomes like this, with all of their gloss, Neeson exudes that mysterious fragrance of complete control. There will be no Oscars for "Taken," just money.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.