Steinfeld, an Oscar nominee at 14 as Mattie Ross in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, tries her best but would need Amber Heard’s giant syringe to inject plausible life into Zooey. But, honestly, the line is insulting, not so much to Ethan or the audience as to all the mothers the movie thinks are incapable of helping their kids learn to ride on two wheels. Like Ethan, I had a dirty job to do - he to kill or die, I to watch the rest of the movie. But when he asks why she hasn’t ridden the bike he gave her, and she says she doesn’t know how, he snaps, “What kind of girl doesn’t know how to ride a bike?” At that moment, sensing the worst, I promised myself that I would bolt from the theater if Zooey snarled: “The kind of girl who never had a father to teach her how to ride a bike.” Well, she did. O.K., he wants her to be the little girl he remembers, and she wants him to treat her like an adult. The Ethan-Zooey scenes are supposed to be poignant, and aren’t. Maybe that’s supposed to be funny, and isn’t. (READ: Richard Schickel’s review of the McG Charlie’s Angels movie) When Vivi gives Ethan an injection of the supposedly life-extending medicine, she uses a syringe big enough to hold the icing for a royal wedding cake. But these scenes are Billy Wilder gold compared with those involving Heard’s preposterous CIA sexpot - a Charlie’s Angel gone glam-punk dominatrix in Miley Cyrus-style image makeover. While the writers plant little plot turds - the ringtone, a bicycle, a wristwatch - for Ethan to keep stepping in throughout the picture, they also push too hard on the comic conceit of a killer who needs parenting advice from his putative victims: an underworld limo driver (Marc Andréoni) and The Wolf’s Italian accountant (Bruno Ricci). Now he’s got two families to take care of. When he returns glumly to his flat after his medical diagnosis, he finds it occupied by some (very friendly) Afro-French squatters. And he doesn’t speak French, though he was apparently stationed in Paris and keeps an apartment there. A Pittsburgh Steelers fan, he calls the NFL game “real football” he has no use for prissy soccer. The comedy, such as it is intended, comes from the collision of 21st-century Zooey and the dinosaur Ethan, who loves and plays LPs and VCR tapes and wears faded jeans like, Hugh says, “all you American cowboys.” (Since Costner starred in the Westerns Silverado and Wyatt Earp, and directed Dances With Wolves and Open Range, he probably wouldn’t take the observation as an insult.) In fact, for a guy who’s roamed the world killing bad guys, Ethan is pretty parochial. (READ: Corliss’s reviews of Taken and Taken 2) “Can I call you right back, honey?” he all but says. To assure his availability, Zooey puts her ringtone on his phone - Icona Pop’s “I Love It (I Don’t Care)” - which tends to play just as Ethan is about to maim or slaughter some bad guy. (READ: The Costner-Clancy connection in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit)īut Besson and co-scripter Adi Hasak figured to tweak the Taken recipe by making Ethan babysit Zooey over those three days: cook meals, critique her outré hair styles, confer with her school principal, supervise her romance with French classmate Hugh (Jonas Bloquet) and, when she sneaks out to a disco, save her from a gang rape. And Costner is no stranger to aging Agency studs: just last month he played one, and with his old easy power, in the Tom Clancy espionage thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Both films also follow the Besson rule of giving the hero at least five adversaries at a time to beat up or gun down. In the first Taken, Neeson was a CIA field agent whose work had wrecked his status as husband and father, and who follows his daughter to Paris when she is abducted by sex-traffickers.
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