'Taken' Is Justice–And It's About Time

There is little justice in this world.

Probably because the bad guys have so many apologists.

Taken, on the other hand, is an all-out revenge fantasy in which — finally — the Go-Slow Gang and their Root Causes Orchestra are relegated to playing the music behind somebody else’s movie. Taken is entertainment and catharsis in which the good guys win, the bad guys die (and painfully), and justice is achieved on the basis of what Right and Wrong are to anyone with that rarest of 21st century entities, common sense.

Of course, the “bad guys getting theirs” is nothing new, and just one standard version of the tension and release that is the essence of drama. Why should this movie be such a rare pleasure?

Because sophistication (sic) in the form of rampant political correctness demands self-denial to the point of absurdity. We are to set ourselves apart from basic impulses, even when those impulses are useful, and especially when it comes to absolute notions of Right and Wrong. The post-9/11 world is especially bad for that: Our self-appointed betters tell us, variously, that we should not fight back; that we deserve our wounds; that evil can be negotiated with – or that there is no such thing as evil in the first place; and that enemies are, universally, just friends we haven’t met.

Impotence in the face of excuse-making for the bad guys sucks the hope for justice right out of you. We lock up terrorists at Gitmo, and many Americans are less concerned for the immediate safety of their neighbors than for the expansive rights they imagine all terrorists should have. Now Gitmo is being closed and the argument is whether to house the terrorists in Kansas or South Carolina. Let me put that in clearer terms: Do you want the “bust ’em out” gang sure to come for them to buy airplane tickets for the East Coast or the Midwest? Decisions, decisions.

Yet there is almost nothing a typical American can do to affect this.

I read today that the total federal expenditure on the so-called credit crisis is now enough to pay off nine out of ten outstanding home mortgages. Nine out of ten. Let me boil that down for you: Washington says that since borrowing is the problem, the solution is to borrow some more. What do you suppose their cure is for someone who has drunk Drano?

Again, those of us who took on mortgages we could afford and kept paying them off by working at jobs that we perhaps did not like are being saddled with somebody else’s careless debt. Who’s suffering the consequences besides us?

So here comes Taken, in which great evil meets great justice swiftly, surely, and certainly. Now that’s more like it. Forgive me if I have a good time.