‘Taken 1, 2, and 3’: Modern Masculinity Meets Modern Fatherhood

When looked at as a trilogy, the ‘Taken’ films are all about Bryan’s relationship with his daughter as she becomes a woman and he is no longer sure how to relate to her. It’s a common real life situation writ large, and a wholly unexpected through-line for an action franchise.

Poster for Taken
Poster for Taken

Written by Elizabeth Kiy.


There are certain movies I watch whenever I visit my father. I would never chose to watch them on my own, but I enjoy them enough with him. These movies are instantly gratifying, explosions of car crashes and car chases, kidnappings and jewel thefts and mistaken identities and usually, the strong, comforting presence of his favorite movie star, Liam Neeson, the new model of masculinity.

With his soft Irish accent, his politeness and grooming, he’s a completely different animal from our old action heroes. He’s muscular but still human looking- not a steroid monster like 80s heroes like Stallone and Schwarzenegger. He can love, he can cry, but he can still seek revenge or save your life; however, like these old models, his heft still imposes. Though he kicks down doors and ends lives with violence, he’s smart, well-trained and tactical, outsmarting the villains as often as he actually comes to blows with them.

Liam Neeson is the new model for modern masculinity
Liam Neeson is the new model for modern masculinity

 

In Taken, the film that established Neeson as “The New Man,” he’s Bryan Mills, an ex-CIA operative on a mission to save his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace) from sex traffickers who have kidnapped her while on vacation in France. Besides Neeson’s emergence as a one-man killing machine, it’s not a wholly original film; it’s essentially a rape revenge plot where a daughter and her virginity are entrusted to the protection of her father.

However, when looked at as a trilogy, the Taken films are all about Bryan’s relationship with his daughter as she becomes a woman and he is no longer sure how to relate to her. It’s a common real life situation writ large, and a wholly unexpected through-line for an action franchise.

The Taken films are really about Bryan’s relationship with his daughter
The Taken films are really about Bryan’s relationship with his daughter

 

He tries to figure out how to balance being sensitive and being manly. He doesn’t know how to talk to his daughter anymore; in the first film, they have a strained relationship. He attempts to get through to her by getting her a meeting with her favourite singer who he is acting as a bodyguard for, but the real way he is able to show his love is by saving her life.

When they return home, she’s ready to love him and talk to him again, becoming so close as a family that she and her mother (Famke Janssen), his ex-wife, visit him in Istanbul in the sequel.

In the third movie, their relationship is showing growing pains again. Kim’s in college and Bryan buys her a giant teddy bear for his birthday, adorably excited about the gift. You can feel his heart break when she rejects the bear because she’s too old for it. He wants her to be his little girl, looking at him with stars in her eyes again; we find out she’s pregnant and there may soon be another little girl to look up to him.

In Taken, Bryan is on a time crunch to save Kim’s virginity as well as her life. While her sexually active friend is almost immediately left to die in a makeshift junkyard brothel with no one to care about her, as a virgin, Kim is saved to be auctioned off to a cabal of wealthy international men, which gives Bryan more time to save her. When Bryan finally tracks her down and takes her home, she seems undamaged by her ordeal. By Taken 3, when Kim discovers she is pregnant, it appears that her virginity was saved for the ultimate purpose of becoming a mother.

Kim helps save her parents
Kim helps save her parents

 

As a trilogy, the Taken films chronicle Kim’s apprenticeship with her father. After being a damsel in distress rescued in the first film, she returns in Taken 2 to fight against men related to her original kidnappers, getting her revenge on them as the attempt to get revenge on Bryan. When Bryan and her mother, Lenore, are kidnapped, Kim follows Bryan’s instructions over the phone, locating him in the city and providing him with weapons at risk of her life, instead of hiding out at the American Embassy like he originally instructs her to. In Taken 3, a riff on The Fugitive, Kim helps hide her father and investigates her mother’s murder. The culmination of her training is an interrogation scene where a cop questions her about Bryan’s whereabouts and his relationship with Lenore; as she answers him, she sounds exactly like her father.

Kim’s training is displayed in her interrogation
Kim’s training is displayed in her interrogation

 

Famke Janssen, as Bryan’s ex-wife and Kim’s mother, fares less well across in the franchise. Bryan’s first indication in Taken–that something may go wrong on Kim’s trip to France–is his last minute discovery that Kim and her friend are planning to follow the band U2 on their European tour. It seems to have little to nothing to do with the actual human trafficking plot, but is used to paint Lenore as a bad mother who isn’t careful enough about her daughter’s safety. In the sequel, she waits around to be saved by the combined efforts of her husband and daughter and by Taken 3, she’s barely around, succumbing to Women in Refrigerators syndrome in the first few minutes of the film.

Famke Janssen’s role is to be only a victim and a bad mother
Famke Janssen’s role is to be only a victim and a bad mother

 

It seems that Kim’s pregnancy is intended to present her a both masculine and feminine, taking in a bit of both her mother (whose only real role was to have a daughter to be saved in the first place) and her father. Taken 3 flirted with Kim’s decision whether or not to have an abortion, though in the end, there wasn’t really a point. Of course, this big budget mainstream action film isn’t going to end with a character deciding to get an abortion, but it’s interesting that it was even presented as an option and that this new model for masculinity supported her right to chose either way.

One can only wonder if Liam Neeson will fight through Taken 4 with his new grandchild strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn.

 


Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Seed & Spark: The Effect of Being ‘Taken’: The Commodification of the Female Body

But this to me is the part we should pay attention to. When we don’t get to be headstrong, sexy scientists with daddy issues, we’re locked away. Because evidently we’re worth a lot, which while flattering, also insinuates that we are prizes that can be traded, bought, or stolen. In any film of the above mentioned genres, it’s safe to assume that at some point, the concerned wife, sexy girlfriend, or charming daughter will be kidnapped. When the body is used as a bargaining chip, the images that flood our minds are women tied to chairs, kidnappers holding phones to our crying faces, and makeshifts rag gags in our mouths.

This is a guest post by Mara Gasbarro Tasker.

As much as I would love to have Liam Neeson running around after me all day, I’d rather it not be because I had been abducted and stuck tied to a chair. But this seems to be one of the only ways that we get to see women on screen in today’s high stakes thrillers. In my last post, I talked about the use of rape in storytelling and its commonplace usage as a catalyst in stories. Today, I wanted to shed some light on the use of kidnapping the female body for the purpose of narrative drive.

Women have limited opportunities on screen; we all know this to be true and there are a number of reasons that this is the case. But looking beyond that fact, I think it’s important to examine the effects of these images. I don’t deny that I love fast-cutting action films. But when thinking back to a significant number of action, thriller, and psychological films, it’s challenging to think of some that don’t include the taking of a female body.

Take Blake Lively in Savages, or Penelope Cruz in The Counselor, or Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight, or Kristen Rudrud in Fargo, or Maggie Grace in Taken.

Penelope Cruz being stalked in "The Counselor"
Penelope Cruz being stalked in The Counselor

 

Each of these films and many, many more, use the kidnapping of a female character, of the female body, to raise the stakes. It appears we’re worth something valuable to the story. But as pieces, not players.

Blake Lively Savages
Blake Lively in Savages

 

What’s concerning with these roles is that they perpetuate the quiet and commonplace commodification of a woman’s body, and it’s become the main function of our characters on the screen. This technique of taking someone hostage has been employed in well done ways before. Looking back to The Searchers, Natalie Woods’ abduction by the Comanches still plays on classic weaker female characters, while actually bringing about the space in the film for in depth character reveals and an odyssey that exposes many people over the course of 120 minutes. In films like The Dark Knight, it feels excusable to play on classic comic book themes of revenge, taking a female character hostage, and having some heroic and uniquely strong man come to save her. It’s a model Disney employs in many of its cartoons as well.

But this to me is the part we should pay attention to. When we don’t get to be headstrong, sexy scientists with daddy issues, we’re locked away. Because evidently we’re worth a lot, which while flattering, also insinuates that we are prizes that can be traded, bought, or stolen. In any film of the above mentioned genres, it’s safe to assume that at some point, the concerned wife, sexy girlfriend, or charming daughter will be kidnapped. When the body is used as a bargaining chip, the images that flood our minds are women tied to chairs, kidnappers holding phones to our crying faces, and makeshifts rag gags in our mouths. It seems strange that Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt can work their way out of any god-given scenario but women, even the smart ones we encounter in films, can’t seem to stay out of trouble.

The problem is that this storytelling device has been overdone and like violence, is now often used as a lazy attempt to raise the stakes and create tension. Everyone who loves anyone knows that losing that person would drive them mad. But does it always have to be the woman?

David Foster Wallace, in his heartbreaking series of shorts in Oblivion, describes all human beings as being comprised of an infinite number of eternities. It’s one of my favorite ways to understand people now. And so I ask, if that’s the case, if we’re all made up of an infinite matrix of capable emotions and therefore reactions, why has film, an art that encompasses so many senses, boiled itself down to simplistic storytelling where the best way to ignite anger or the want of revenge in someone is to “take” his woman?

Kim (Maggie Grace) hiding from her abductors in "Taken"
Kim (Maggie Grace) hiding from her abductors in Taken

 

Let’s take a look at a few more contemporary films to illustrate this point, starting with Taken, and of course its sequels. Round one of Taken dishes up a nice storyline of a young American woman who travels abroad with her best friend, makes one ill-advised move and spends the rest of the film being sold into sex slavery. Meanwhile, her father, who thank god is Liam Neeson and has a very special set of skills (that he’s allowed to have, as male protagonists are), comes to save her. In Taken 2, shock me, shock me, Liam’s wife gets kidnapped.  In both films, it’s the stolen woman’s body that gets things moving and that allows this stretch of space on screen for our hero.

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) and his special skills in "Taken"
Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) and his special skills in Taken

In Prisoners, a powerful film with incredible performances, who is it that goes missing? Who is made voiceless? Who is rendered a token of something? While in a film like this it is integral to the reveal of character and mystery, again we should ask – why at the cost of a young woman? Hugh Jackman’s character Keller Dover embarks on a manhunt when his daughter is kidnapped with her friend. Because why not? How many models have we seen where it’s not a female?  Man on Fire uses the same technique- a young woman, a young child, taken for sinister reasons because by simply holding on to her, our usual antagonists can cash out and manipulate their adversary, who we’re in turn cheering on to “recapture” the victim.

There are, of course, comedic twists like Fargo, which also happens to be a film I absolutely love. But again here, we have a female role whose purpose, while hilariously treated at times, is to be stolen, missing, and the tool in the story that the plot revolves around.

Enjoying the day's work (Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, & Kristen Rudrud) in "Fargo"
Enjoying the day’s work (Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, and Kristen Rudrud) in Fargo

 

My purpose in highlighting these tropes is that we must pay attention to the trade of the female body. If any characters in the film have a qualm, it is often settled by “taking” the other person’s loved one, and this is more often than not, a woman in their life. Our roles, as reflected back at us on screen, have limited dialogue because there is usually a rag in our faces keeping us from speaking.
We’re fed images of a woman who is made to disappear at some point in the film, left without a voice and made entirely helpless until the male protagonist comes along. This is plot device that is designed to distract from the fact that not enough story has actually been developed.

Remove the woman from this equation. You have character A wanting to get something from character B. There could be any number of mysterious ways to do this. Manipulation, lies, fights, theft, threats, coaxing. There are a thousand ways around the central and overused plot device of the female body. Personally, I think we’ve stop noticing. We’ve stopped paying attention to the fact that we are treated a commodities on screen. Not a far cry from the use of rape as a narrative catalyst, what does constantly kidnapping a woman say about what we are? We have become the stakes.

We have complacently accepted that a crime against a woman is rarely a crime against her. Rather, it’s an indirect attack against her husband, boyfriend, or father. It is a violation of the male character when the female is traded in some illicit way. Even intelligent, scientific, and clearly downplayed but sexy scientist characters somehow still find their way into these traps.  We identify these crimes against women as crimes against someone else. This removes us from the responsibility of a committing a heinous crime against a female figure and makes her simply a piece in the malefaction rather than the recipient of the aggression–which she is.

This rids us of human qualities. It rids women of screen time, of dialogue, of control. It once again quietly pushes us from roles as real people in film and in life, to props for narrative mobility. In using women in this way, we visually inform ourselves over and over and over again that our only option is to wait for someone stronger to come. . We’re the thing that they need to get back.

Liam Neeson, come running for me. Anytime you want. But I’d rather it be for love than because I didn’t have enough pepper spray on me to avoid a really shitty day.

*Side note worth mentioning – in trying to find images for this article, it was surprisingly hard to find pictures of the women in their hostage situation. It’s almost like it never happened. Or you find porn.

Mara Gasbarro Tasker
Mara Gasbarro Tasker

Mara Gasbarro Tasker is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles.  She’s currently working as an Associate Producer at Vice Media and has co-created the Chattanooga Film Festival, launching later this spring.  She holds a BFA in Film Production from the University of Colorado at Boulder.  She is directing a grindhouse short in April and is still mourning the end of Breaking Bad.

Rethinking Sex Trafficking and Voyeurism: ‘Taken’ and ‘Eden’

Written by Rachel Redfern

The current Hollywood climate and the overwhelming ridiculousness of most of the big blockbusters being churned out of that machine is something that we talk about a lot over here at Bitch Flicks. The problems with a lack of unique female characters, general lack of original plot and substantive dialogue are just a few of the major problems going on right now. But on top of that has been a trend I recently noticed concerning our portrayal of sex trafficking as a tool to demonstrate the general kick-ass, uber-masculine, damsel-in-distress saving, action star. Specifically, I’m talking about the films Taken, Taken 2, and Trade.

In this case, the horrific abuse that is the daily life of many sex trafficking victims is wantonly used as mere shock factor, and in the process, allows a seedy voyeurism of the acts of torture and sexual assault that happen in such films. Does it do more harm or good to have such shocking and graphic scenes portrayed so cavalierly? For instance, the harm comes from using shocking scenes as a way to drive up viewership and glamorizing a very real global human rights violation; the good comes from the fact that these intense films do have a large viewership and in that, those films can spread awareness of the issue.

The issue is a complicated one and I have written about it for other venues here, but despite the fact that there are some very problematic films about sex trafficking running around out there, there are also some very good ones. Specifically, the 2012 film, Eden, directed by Megan Griffiths and just released on DVD last month. 

Jamie Chung as Eden

Eden is based off the true-life story of Chong Kim (Jamie Chung), a young Korean American woman who was kidnapped and sold into sex slavery in the United States. Many do not realize that the United States is unfortunately a huge participant in the importation and the exploitation of immigrations and US citizens in the global sex trafficking trade.

Eden chronicles Chong’s two years of experiences in a well-connected, organized prostitution ring within the American Southwest. Chong (renamed Eden by the organization) begins to climb the ladder of her own organization as a way to survive and eventually escape, an action that fully demonstrates the twisted reach of the organization.

Eden is a slow-moving tale, one that takes time to develop and highlight the changes and trauma that are influencing Chong, allowing the story, and Chong’s character, to grow as a result. The film is episodic in nature, skipping ahead to highlight significant moments within her capture and showcasing the passage of time.

As well, the fact that the United States has a substantial piece of the sex trafficking trade is exposed in this film. Eden is grounded in the US experience, even showing Chong within a standard US suburb being shuttled too and from homes as a prostitute. The landscape is familiar, as are the men and women she comes into contact with; it’s horrifying to realize how easily sex trafficking and its victims slip in and out of American life.
 

Jamie Chung as Eden–making her way up the ladder of the organization


Chong is an American citizen, and Eden portrays how many of the women are young American youths who have been sold or have run away from home. But Chong also has Asian heritage from her Korean parents, which means that in the film she must pretend to be an underage Chinese prostitute as a gimmick to get clients, a horrifically true detail that Chong Kim talks about here in an excerpt (page 11-12). Immigrants are usually considered the largest target of sex trafficking. It’s horrible to realize that such a situation is considered sexually desirable by some who use prostitutes.

But the film never explicitly shows the rape or torture scenes. We are aware of what’s happening and even of the effect that these actions have on Eden, but neither are we made to be participants in the same actions that the film is portraying. In fact, in this instance, not showing is a far more effective tool in demonstrating the seriousness and reality of sex trafficking. Instead of the focus being placed on the gratuitously violent rape-torture scene, the focus can instead be placed on how this trauma is affecting her, how the organization operates, and its insidious place within much of mainstream society.

Rather than focusing on the big man coming to save her, Eden is about her experiences, how she learns to survive, how she uses her own resources to facilitate her escape. That’s not to say that sex trafficking victims should in any way shape or form be responsible for their removal from sex trafficking, but it is important that films don’t just use sex trafficking as an action movie plot device.

Eden may be a little slow-moving, and I think it could have been longer, giving even more time to show Eden’s development and the effects of sex trafficking, but on the whole, Eden is a fine independent film, by a young and upcoming female director. We need more films telling subtle and focused stories about the thousands of victims of sex trafficking around the world. 



  
Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection; however, she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism. 

 

The Neeson Identity: What the Release of ‘The Grey’ Got Wrong About Men

This is a guest post by Margaret Howie.
With the release of Taken 2, Liam Neeson impersonations are all over the internet again. You’d think that we had all been starved of Neeson material, but it was only back in January that his Man vs. the Wild movie, The Grey was released. Along with it we got a PR campaign based largely around his qualities as a leading man, and some revealing media coverage about gender roles in cinema.
The trailer for The Grey ticked all the familiar wilderness survival story clichés, right up until one of the last shots. That was the sight of Neeson taping broken bottles to his fists for a head-on confrontation with a pack of wolves. Accompanying this enticing promise of Neeson taking on predators fist-first, the surrounding promotion promised even more from the movie. The Grey was going to be more than an action flick. It would be a profound examination of the state of modern man. Much of this argument centred on the casting of the Northern Irish actor, and the director’s insistence that his star represented something lacking from modern film: authentic masculinity. Eventually much of the discussion of The Grey turned into rants about maleness. It shows how depressingly quickly gender stereotypes can be recycled and reinforced in something as innocuous as movie promotion.
Liam Neeson in The Grey (2012). Beard. Check. Snow. Check. Y Chromosome. Check.
Post-Star Wars, Neeson has become best known for his display of clenched-jaw determination in the face of cinematic adversary. Almost twenty years since Schindler’s List, the audience has faith in his capabilities to release the Kraken, defeat terrorists, get his daughter back and punch out a wolf. Parodies of his line deliveries in 2008’s Taken and 2010’s Clash of the Titans continue to get uploaded to YouTube. With the release of The Grey there was another opportunity to salute his hard-boiled, reluctant-action-hero persona and reflect on how it fits in a survival film.
Directed by Joe Carnahan and co-starring Frank Grillo and Dermot Mulroney, The Grey is described by Open Road Films as the story of “an unruly group of oil-rig roughnecks when their plane crashes into the remote Alaskan wilderness. Battling mortal injuries and merciless weather, the survivors have only a few days to escape the icy elements – and a vicious pack of rogue wolves on the hunt.”
What goes without saying is that the group is all-male. What did go on to get said, across film blogs and in news reports, was that the men of this film were delivering something supposedly missing from the cultural diet. Gender quickly became one of the most-discussed themes of The Grey’s pre-release coverage. Both movie reporters and their interviewees worked lines about masculinity into the discussions. Soon an idea of Liam Neeson’s ‘maleness’ being some sort of scarce resource emerged. The subject was set up by Neeson’s particular popular culture position, the mostly male cast, the genre and the writer/director Carnahan’s strident views of the state of casting in Hollywood. Is there really a dearth of manliness in cinema? Or does Dermot Mulroney get it right when he complained that “all the f–king movies are about the girls”?
The wilderness survival movie tends to be a generically male construction. In December 2011, Collider reviewed the trailer and Matt Goldberg added, “I can’t remember the last time we saw a solid men-vs-wild movie [since The Edge].” But perhaps the title should have reminded him. Men vs. wild films have been coming out solidly, even if you only count ones with ‘The’ in the title. Since The Edge was released in 1997, The Hunted, The Missing, The Way Back, and The Donner Party have all provided stories of steely-eyed male protagonists facing down both the wilderness and the worst of human nature.
Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge. Beards. Snow. Wilderness. Etc.
In a ‘close read’ of the film, posted on the day of the film’s release, Movieline’s Jen Yamato asked whether The Grey was a “welcome return to masculine cinema.” This was explored through quotes from the cast and director. Actor Dermot Mulroney said, “I’ve made a lot of movies that had both men and women in them, a lot of movies that were dominated by the woman’s storyline. And in this case it was a very different experience making the movie and enjoying the movie, when it was completed, because of the fact that there are no women in it… It was like thank God, I get to do a movie with just guys.”
Cast member Frank Grillo said that “It’s tough being a man. It really is tough being a man.” His co-star Dallas Roberts was quoted as saying, “But that’s the problem with discussing modern masculinity, isn’t it, because you’re a moron as soon as you open your mouth and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Mulroney expanded on the subject of cinematic testosterone in another interview with Movieline. It went on to be posted under the headline “The Sweet Relief of Being in a Manly Movie Like The Grey.” His response to a question about representing ‘what it means to be a man’ in the film was:
“So you say this movie has some throwback qualities, or some old school manly-man qualities; that’s intentional… So, guilty as charged on that; if that’s something that needs to be brought back, then let’s bring it back. It seems like people are responding to that about this movie and to my mind there haven’t been enough of them. The pendulum swung the other way since I started in this business and there were men’s movies like whatever those Tom Cruise movies [were]”

He continues “…then all of a sudden Sigourney Weaver comes in the Alien and we have strong women, we have Working Girl, we have all this, we have Best Friend’s Wedding, and before you know it, all the f–king movies are about the girls!”

Movieline’s headline presents The Grey as a ‘sweet relief’ to this abundance of girls, uncritically accepting Mulroney’s point and working it in to the appeal of the movie for audiences. This theme of the ‘masculine’ film continued to crop up in the promotional work surrounding the film’s release. Carnahan went on to frame his casting decisions around an idea of endangered manliness. The HuffPo blog Tribeca Film highlighted it in their interview with him, using the headline “Call of the Wild: Masculinity and Mother Nature in The Grey.” In the article, Carnahan talks about his cast, saying “They are unmistakably masculine as opposed to these vacuous kids in Hollywood right now…For The Grey, I was interested in a very specific kind of masculinity.”
He goes on to summon up this ‘very specific kind’ as embodied by Neeson through comparing him with Justin Bieber. Carnahan positions manliness in terms of dismissal and revulsion with the kind of ‘vacuous kids’ teenage Bieber apparently represents, and links credibility with age. The casting issue comes up again in The Daily Blam, where the writer Pietro Filipponi paraphrases his interview with Carnahan by saying “Casting…wasn’t as easy as you’d think” and quoting the director holding forth again on the seeming epidemic of “shirtless boys…with blank stares.” Filipponi suggests that “movie goers may scratch their collective heads wondering why other well known (and younger) actors weren’t selected for this film.”
In the Film School Rejects interview with Carnahan they discusses the “surprise” fact that younger actor Bradley Cooper (who is 37) was “almost” cast, and the interviewer Jack Giroux also brings up the idea that Carnahan’s “characters are usually very manly.”
The connection between Neeson’s casting (the director calls it the film’s “trump card”) and the “manly” aspect of his character is presented as a given. The contrast between younger Cooper and Neeson, who is 59, isn’t pressed, but in another interview with Moviehole the director continues to strongly connect his leading man with idealised masculinity. He says that “Liam embodied that much more easily than a younger actor would have” and commented on Neeson’s “strength and profundity as a man and as an actor.”
Discussions about The Grey and its portrayal of endangered masculinity originated in the movie blogosphere, but proved to be popular beyond it. When Joe Carnahan told film site Collider that Hollywood “premium on boys instead of men” and that films were “sorely lacking” in Neeson’s “ilk,” his quote was picked up by an entertainment news agency. The line came from a video interview with the director, who had been asked about the decision to cast his leading man. Talking about how “shirtless seventeen-year-olds” are being “passed off as a masculine form,” he goes on to say: “The reason that a guy like Liam, who’s nearly 60 years old, is having this resurgent kind of career swing is because we are sorely lacking in his ilk in this business right now.”
It garnered a decent amount of coverage, certainly more than most non-Tarantino director’s interviews are likely to, even in Oscar season. The quote was picked up by entertainment news agency Cover Media and was recycled on entertainment sites like ONTD and the UK’s Daily Express. Along with the jokes made about Neeson’s wolf-punching virility it became one of the underpinnings of The Grey’s online media coverage.
Magazine website Crushable reposted Carnahan’s quote under the headline “Liam Neeson Is Having a Career Resurgence Because He’s the Most Masculine Actor in Hollywood,” with writer Natalie Zutter concluding: “There are no men in Hollywood.” The same site emphasises Neeson’s skill set by creating a very manly paper doll of him in full action hero pose. He’s pictured surrounded by everyday items he can recycle into “the perfect weapons.” Same as, the writer points out, Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity – an actor and role not mentioned in her other article, probably because it dismantles the point that Zutter (and Carnahan himself) is making. 
Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. Non-existent leading man.
Yahoo’s Shine blog used the line as a springboard to ask “Where Are Hollywood’s Manly Men?” Author Piper Weiss reiterates Carnahan’s idea of a “lack,” referring to Neeson as the “last of the man-hicans” and calling them “a dying breed if ever there was one.” Weiss goes on to list ten other prominent movie stars who fit this particular “breed.” It harks back to Carnahan’s stated desire for a “very different kind of masculinity,” a call for an essentialist gender role of some type that’s now, apparently, unfashionable and endangered. Ironically, eight of them are white, unintentionally reflecting one of the true shortages in Hollywood casting.
Writer Christian Toto, writing for the conservative Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog, used Neeson’s profile to write about “Why Masculinity Matters.” Comparing the profit of The Grey with Taylor Lautner-starring action film Abduction, Toto concludes that “the soon to be 60-year-old Neeson matters because he’s bringing something fresh to theatres, the sense of a fully capable alpha male who doesn’t regret taking decisive action.” How rare this ‘fully capable alpha male’ quality is, and how unique it makes Neeson’s appearance on screen, may appear inarguable when contrasted with the twenty-year-old Lautner’s box office disappointment.
However, Abduction opened up against two arguably manly films, Killer Elite and Moneyball, and only a couple of weeks away from several other testosterone-heavy storylines, Warrior, Drive, Courageous, and Real Steel. All of them featured flawed male leads, many of them (including Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Brad Pitt, and Hugh Jackman) old enough to be Lautner’s father. It also doesn’t take into account that Lautner’s film was beaten at the box office by a movie with negligible alpha-male qualities called Dolphin Tale.
Masculinity definitely does still matter, as the Women’s Media Centre study of gender representation [pdf] in U.S. media shows. It reported the distressing results of a 2012 report by Smith, Choueti & Gall on female representation in mainstream movies. The authors found that female characters made up just a third of the speaking roles in the top hundred grossing films of 2007, 2008, and 2009. Looking at ‘gender balance’ in these movies, where “the girls” contributed to around half of the characters, only one in six films qualified. In films, female leads are still the exception, never the rule, no matter how overwhelmed Dermot Mulroney feels.
Given this, it feels like an overstatement to hear all these announcements that cinema audiences will be shocked at seeing a cast of legal male adults, or even a star – Neeson – old enough to have fathered Bradley Cooper. Particularly considering that a writer who asked where the manly men are in Hollywood could then come up with ten prominent actors, like Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, who fit her misty-eyed description of manliness.
The popularity of Carnahan’s quote shows off the attraction of discussing a non-event like ‘disappearing masculinity.’ This argument makes out that The Grey is a special event, a chance for grown-ups – particularly men – to have a rare opportunity to see themselves onscreen. As well as being savvy PR, there’s almost an ideological challenge in this. The lurking subtextual suggestion is that if the audience does not front up, there will be less and less of the kind of gender ideal that Neeson has come to embody, with his daughter-rescuing, wolf-punching cragged good looks and air of tragic fortitude. Man vs. wolf is also man vs. box office, man vs. the empty calories of what Carnahan dismisses as “shirtless boys with…blank stares,” and by extension a dearth of movies with ‘male’ stories.
Comparing like-with-like, North American January cinema releases have in fact offered audiences plenty of films with central adult male leads facing difficult odds. The Grey was being released on the same weekend as the expanded release of 50-year-old George Clooney in The Descendents, and in a month with new films starring Dennis Quaid, Mark Wahlberg, Ralph Fiennes, and Ewan McGregor, all actors over forty. In January 2011, The Way Back was released, about seven men and one young woman walking 4000 miles to escape the Soviet gulags. In 2010 came the general American release of the Alp-climbing adventure film North Face. In 2009, instead of a survival epic there was Taken, the terrorist thriller that marked the beginning of the recreated Liam Neeson as action hero. In 2008 the most recent Rambo film came out, bringing back the renegade army vet to fight the Burmese military junta in the jungle. In 2007 Joe Carnahan’s mostly-male action film, Smokin’ Aces, was released – as was kidnapping thriller Alpha Dog, a suitable name for a movie where six of the seven top-billed actors were male. The year before that, January audiences were given the option of going to see Eight Below, another survival tale set in the Antarctic, starring two men and their pack of dogs.
Men dominate the blockbuster field, and the cult of youth is not as entrenched as Carnahan makes out. Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Vin Diesel, Matt Damon, Nicholas Cage, and Will Smith all opened films among the top-grossing of 2011, and are all also on the far side of forty. Harrison Ford is over sixty, as is Sylvester Stallone, and soon movie theatres will see the return of Arnold Schwarzengger, born in 1947.
Willem Defoe in The Hunter. Beard. Snow. Raw masculinity. Rinse and repeat.
In 2012, while The Grey opened in theatres, a trailer for the new film The Hunter was released online. Instead of Man vs. wolf, this ‘The’ movie (starring 56-year-old Willem Defoe) is about Man vs. tiger. Linda Ge, writing for the comic book website Bleeding Cool, compared it to The Grey, adding that the Neeson film may be “paving the way for moviegoers to find their way to this similarly themed movie in their further search of more “bad ass with a beard takes on all predators’ stories.”
Movieline acknowledged this bad ass/beard/predator trope by looking back at The Edge. A few weeks after The Grey opened Nathan Pensky’s essay noted that “this genre is certainly well-trod territory” and comparing the protagonists of both films to Cast Away and Into the Wild. There’s no mention in the short article of how all these films are about men. For his part, Carnahan made a joke during the promotional cycle about what an all-female version of his film would consist of: “The movie would be 15 minutes long. They’d all agree on what to do, they’d walk out and live.”
Pensky, Ge, and Carnahan all made different statements that overlap at the same points of genre and gender. The Grey is part of a film release schedule that is heavily weighted to stories about men, and a popular trope that has become a representative for stories about the male condition. The presence of women would be so improbable that it becomes humorous, detracting from the key narrative tension – Man vs. [some predatory element of nature]. It doesn’t take much Hollywood savvy to guess how few actresses will be considered to play a ‘bad ass with a beard.’
Statistics and the deluge of similar films contradict this idea that we’re losing a masculine identity from cinema. Although the space from Justin Bieber to Liam Neeson via Bradley Cooper seems like a fairly narrow distance to cover, movies focussing on (white) adult men fit in very comfortably with the current cinematic landscape. Grizzled masculinity is so secure in popular culture it’s become a reliable punchline. With the release of The Grey’s trailer, there was a mini-meme phenomenon of lists like ‘What Should Liam Neeson Punch Next?,’ ‘10 Badass Adversaries Worthy of Fighting Liam Neeson’ and ‘10 Crazy Things Liam Neeson Should Fight Onscreen.’ Simon Pegg tweeted that: “If you do get into a fight, just say “Liam Neeson” as you throw a punch, your mittens will catch fire and your enemy’s life will fall off” and that after exposure to the actor’s presence “I was 78% better at fighting swarthy goons.”
Being able to talk about manliness had obvious appeal when it came to selling The Grey to audiences. The ‘toughness’ of being a man was exploited as the theme of the film, then toughness of casting a ‘man’s man’ sparked a ripple of discussion. It was a discussion with a hollow centre. No matter how few sensible adversaries would be willing to take on Liam Neeson, there is no upcoming shortage in films being made about him and his kind. Bad asses with beards are not going to make cinema’s endangered species list anytime soon.
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Margaret Howie cheerfully lives with her love of Robert Mitchum and her feminist sensibility in South London, watching and thinking about as many movies she can see.

Flick-Off: Taken

So I decided to watch one of those mind-numbingly mediocre action films, assuming I’d walk away from the experience merely mind-numbed and ready to move forward with more serious cinema. The exact opposite happened. Not only is Taken a terribly made film in terms of its pacing, plot points, character development, and dialogue, it’s one of the most offensive, misogynistic films I’ve seen in a long time.
imdb summary: Seventeen year-old Kim is the pride and joy of her father Bryan Mills. Bryan is a retired agent who left the Secret Service to be near Kim in California. Kim lives with her mother Lenore and her wealthy stepfather Stuart. Kim manages to convince her reluctant father to allow her to travel to Paris with her friend Amanda. When the girls arrive in Paris they share a cab with a stranger named Peter, and Amanda lets it slip that they are alone in Paris. Using this information an Albanese gang of human traffickers kidnaps the girls. Kim barely has time to call her father and give him information. Her father gets to speak briefly to one of the kidnappers and he promises to kill the kidnappers if they do not let his daughter go free. The kidnapper wishes him “good luck,” so Bryan Mills travels to Paris to search for his daughter and her friend.

First, the tortured relationship between Kim and her father exists solely to set up the mother as a careless, liberal, money-grubbing asshole. While he gets to be the oh-it’s-too-dangerous-for-my-17-year-old-daughter-to-go-to-Paris-alone “good parent,” the mother gets relegated to the role of oh-just-let-her-go-I-mean-what-could-possibly-go-wrong “bad parent.” Of course, shit goes terribly wrong, and the audience can’t help but be all, “that horrible mother should’ve known better!” Then, as is usually the case, Daddy gets to rush to the rescue while Mommy stays at home sobbing into the arms of her new, rich, conveniently helpless husband.

To make matters worse, the Albanese gang deals in sex trafficking, which is an actual, serious issue in the world, an issue that this film exploits to serve the ultimate, final plot point: Daddy gets to save Kim from the evil Albanese sex traffickers in the moments just before she loses her virginity and remains forever “impure.” The most offensive aspect of all this rests on the fact that Bryan’s (and the film’s) focus never veers from his daughter. So, while we see countless drugged-up young women tied to bed posts, waiting to be raped again, the film treats them and their situation as entirely insignificant; the focus always remains on Daddy’s ass-kicking, murdering attempts to save his daughter’s virginity.

After he finds her friend Amanda dead and tied to a bedpost, he moves on to the next young woman who might help him, a girl who happens to have his daughter’s jacket. He runs from room to room, finding women unconscious, enslaved, raped repeatedly, and he saves that particular girl, not because he’s appalled by what’s happened to her, but because she might lead him to his daughter. He nurses her back to health, and as soon as she can speak full sentences, he interrogates her about where she got the jacket. Basically, the film makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to comment on the atrocity of sex trafficking—it serves only as a plot device to help Bryan redeem his broken relationship with his virginal daughter.

I hated this film.