25 things you didn’t know about your favorite action movies

Taken – Liam Neeson just wanted to go to Paris

Taken has become a bit of a meme over the years, but that doesn’t make it any less of a classic. It helped Liam Neeson rebrand himself as an action star, something that doesn’t usually happen for a man that age, especially in Hollywood.

In Taken, Brian Mills (Neeson), a retired CIA agent, reluctantly lets his teenage daughter Kim travel to France with her best friend. When he finds out the girls got kidnapped by an Albanian gang of human traffickers, Brian has to rush to France to save her. He gets as much info as he can from Kim before talking to one of the kidnappers, and then he gets to put his CIA skills to good use.

Neeson didn’t originally have high hopes for the film. In fact, he thought it would bomb, but signed on because he was interested in spending a few months in Paris and getting to learn karate. He was also intrigued by the role since he had rarely been offered action roles in the past. Obviously, Neeson was wrong, and the film became a huge hit, and also helped boost his career as an action star.

Something else interesting about Taken concerns two of the film’s stars, Neeson and Famke Janssen. Both of them have previously starred in movies based on comic books — though nowadays, who hasn’t?

Neeson appeared in Batman Begins as Henri Ducard/Ra’s al Ghul. And Janssen barely needs an introduction. She portrayed Jean Grey/Phoenix in the X-Men movies from 2000-2006, as well as in The Wolverine and in X-Men: Days of Future Past.