Taken

That would be  the word for what  happened to my time and my money when I went to see the movie Taken, starring Liam Neeson.  If you haven't seen it and you don't want to know what happens, I suggest you go play in another corner of the internet somewhere and try my blog again on another day.  

For everyone else . . . the movie is about Liam Neeson's daughter who gets abducted on her first day in Paris.  

Oh, the daughter is 17, by the way, and has been for like a whole hour or two when her parents let her go to Paris alone with another teenager without knowing where she'll be staying or having any contact info at all . . . other than a copy of the U2 World Tour schedule because today's 17 year-old Americans are so into a band from MY high school years  that they'd follow them all over Europe.  Nobody loves Bono more than girls born in 1992, right.

Anyway, back to the plot. 

Here's the abridged version: Girl goes to Paris despite the misgivings of her former spy father.  Girl gets abducted  by Albanian (of course) human traffickers.  Former spy dad still remembers  a trick or  two and kills/disables/tortures  approximately 43 armed men in his ultimately successful attempt to get his daughter back from these degenerate savages.  Girl has been abducted, sold as a sex slave, forced to take such a large amount of drugs that she's half-dead (her friend is completely dead), delivered along with a few other virgin girls to a sheik on a boat, and rescued by her dad who shoots the sheik who's holding a knife  to said girl's throat.

Girl gets back home, runs smiling to meet mom at the airport, and shows up giddy with glee when her dad surprises her by taking her to meet her pop star idol (a fictional version of Shakira) and  Shakira's voice coach.

Now, I didn't mind the movie as a whole.  It was a decent action/thriller.  I can suspend disbelief with the best of them when it comes to a middle aged man being able to singlehandedly defeat an entire ring of savage criminals half his age.  I could buy the car chases in which a handgun is always more effective than a machine gun or a semi-automatic.  I could even go along with the guy's apparently being able  to shoot  up half of Paris without any legal or political consequences or even an interview with Larry King afterward.

The part that spoiled it for me was  the end. The last 100 seconds of the movie,  The girls has, against all odds, survived this unthinkable horror and been brought safely home.

And, apparently, being abducted and made part of the human trafficking industry does nothing to tarnish a 17 year old girl's dreams of becoming a pop star.

I mean, like, duh, right?