taken

I went and saw 'Taken' the other night, that new Liam Neeson film where his daughter goes on holiday to Europe to follow U2's tour around the continent, then she gets kidnapped by some Albanians and sold to some Arabs as a sex slave, and luckily Neeson's character is a highly trained and specialised ninja/military person who can kill 1000 men with his little finger, which is exactly what he does in this film. He kills so many people that you kind of move from 'Wow, this is cool!' to 'Whoa, this is too much' to 'Haha, this is kind of ridiculous now' to 'For the love of God, STOP!'. He walked into houses and mowed people down with guns and punches, tortured this one dude by electrocuting him a lot, shot a fat man in the face. Goddamn. It's how I imagine the poor Chinese Olympians who don't win medals will be treated by the government after the watchful eyes of the world are turned away from the Mystical East. They'll get Liam Neeson in and show them what a gold medal is really worth. Hoo boy. I don't know if that's too politically incorrect, but I figure if it doesn't go down well here then at least I can get a job with Sonya Kruger on Yum Cha.

The point is, this kind of violence isn't really scary. I think it's because Neeson's character is white, and in my head, white people aren't scary. Then again, the Albanians aren't very scary either, and I think that's because the white people are very good at getting rid of the Albanians. So what's to fear? The French, maybe, because they're very sneaky, but even then, they have crepes and hats so it's not all bad. The fact that it's completely unbelievable doesn't count, either - I've been scared shitless by things stupendously more inconceivable. Basically, it's that guns don't scare me. They don't. They're too boring, or too plain, or too something. Now, a knife. A knife will fuck you up. Pencils in the eye will fuck you up. Being made to swallow glass, or dipped in acid, or tied to a chair and whipped with nails, THOSE things are scary because they're possible. Those scenarios exist in our brains, everyone is capable of at least thinking of some thing, some WAY to torture the shit out of a bad person. Guns kinda take the fun out of it. Or something.

After the movie we had one of those conversations about morality and whether the end justifies the means, which made us feel very intelligent but was somewhat diminished by the fact that the film had Holly Valance in it and we weren't at the Como or the Nova but standing outside the Jam Factory having cigarettes and eating leftover popcorn. Not exactly the classiest of evenings. Mass murder and Clinkers - a perfect Saturday night.

The moral of the film, really - and I said this at the time, to rapturous applause, so figure repeating it here can only make me appear smarter and funnier - is that you should never, never, EVER go to a U2 concert. Bono reckons he's all about saving the world? Ha! Put down the glasses and stop the carnage!