If you haven’t seen it, it stars Liam Neeson as an ex CIA badass who has retired so he can be near his teenage daughter. She lives with her mom (Neeson’s ex-wife) and her stepfather, a rich, nice guy who you hate just because he makes Neeson look like a shmo – but not for long! 

Neeson’s daughter is kidnapped by white slavers in Paris and Neeson is very, very serious about getting her back.

You can learn all that from the trailer or the commercial, so I’ll put the real spoilers below the fold. 

Again, I was taken with “Taken,” but you can be sure that some post-modern, critical-whatever-studies types will hate this movie, what with the not-too-subtle “Death Wishy” attacks on non-Americans and the patriarchal revenge fantasy of it all. This is “Thelma and Louise” for fathers.

Okay, for starters, the film starts with Neeson appearing to be a kind of loser. Life has passed him by. He lives in a sad little apartment only a few notches better than a seedy motel room. Maybe he drinks too much. Regrets: he’s clearly had a few. Moreover, we learn fairly quickly that he quit his shadowy CIA work to make up for being an absentee dad and ruining his marriage. His daughter’s stepfather, meanwhile, is super rich. Neeson gets his daughter a Karaoke machine for her 17th birthday. Stepdaddy Warbucks gets her a horse. Neeson looks three feet tall.  

She wants to go to Paris for youthful adventure. But Neeson, like all fathers, knows better. We fathers are wise. Father knows best, damn it. It’s a dangerous world out there. Mom mocks him for being a smothering dork. The daughter wishes her dad could be cool like other dads. 

Neeson finally relents — but only because the ex-wife and daughter lie to him about her real plans. If they hadn’t failed him by lying, and instead told him the truth or listened to him everything would be ok. But no. The trouble with wives and daughters is they don’t blindly follow Dads’ perfect understanding of how the world works. Neeson lets her go to Paris. And, of course, within hours of landing, his daughter and her slutty blonde friend — who seduced Daddy’s little girl into going in the first place – are snatched by brutal Albanian white slavers.   

It’s the mother of “I told you so” moments. But fathers never get to enjoy such moments because we always have to fix the problems that inevitably arise when our women don’t listen.

Indeed, Daddy’s little girl is actually on the phone with him when the kidnapping takes place. Daddy tells her to calm down and if she follows his instructions he will come to the rescue (with a supersized can of whup-ass, the audience immediately understands).  The girl, who is absolutely useless save as metaphor for how girls should always listen to their fathers, follows daddy’s instructions while being kidnapped – giving him seemingly meaningless, but in reality, vital clues to her abductors’ identities — and that’s all he’ll need to save the day.  

Suddenly the soft, rich stepdad is useless except when he too recognizes Neeson’s mad badass skills. After one quick dressing down about whose you-know-what is bigger, the stepdad does the only thing he’s good at: he opens his wallet.  Neeson might as well just say, “Get me a plane, Poindexter.”  

Neeson goes to Paris. He quickly works his way through the handsome young man (they can never be trusted!)  who tricked the girls at the airport. He kills the small army of swarthy Albanians who took the girls (with some really gratuitous torture, as well). And eventually he slaughters Arabs and even another fancy pants rich American. He more than bitch slaps an old (French!) colleague who had the effrontery not to follow Neeson’s orders, but who is also a careerist sell-out who only managed to keep his family together by compromising his principles (something Neeson would never do!). 

In other words, not only is it payback time for anyone who would dare violate his little girl, it’s payback time against anyone who might think they’re better than Neeson. The trampy friend who was abducted with Daddy’s girl? She’s dead from an overdose – serves her right for not staying a virgin! Meanwhile, Daddy’s girl has been sold to high-rent pimps who at least understand the value of staying pure. 

Neeson rescues his daughter and kills lots and lots of people in the process, proving that he didn’t waste his life. After all, Stepdaddy Warbucks could never have rescued her. 

The film closes with the wife all but declaring with her eyes, “You are a real man, not like my castrated ATM machine of a husband,” and, in the very last scene, Daddy makes it possible for the little girl to fulfill her real dream of becoming a singer (Neeson had saved a Britney Spears type singer’s life earlier in the movie and now, like the mouse who pulled the thorn from the lion’s paw, she returns the favor by bringing real happiness to his daughter).  

It is an absolutely brilliant film. If that’s your kind of thing.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published Jan. 7th. It returns today for obvious reasons, but also for the benefit of new readers. The original post and comments can be found here.  

Last summer, Joss Whedon (yes, he’s my master now), caused a minor sensation with his Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. One of the reasons the musical comedy about a would-be super-villain’s miserable love life was so successful — other than Whedon’s pact with Satan whereby he traded his soul, his mint condition Giant Size X-Men # 1 and a lifetime supply of HoHos in exchange for mystical word-talent – was that Whedon was standing on the shoulders of Alan Moore, the author of the landmark comic book Watchmen. More than anyone else, Moore is credited with “deconstructing” the comic book super-hero, and he probably deserves that credit. Though like with all great artistic innovators, Moore had his influences in this regard. Every artist has in his background a mob of ghostly helpers bigger than the crowd of phone technicians in that Verizon commercial. For instance, Marvel Comics (where my first loyalties lie, for the record) had already broken considerable ground in humanizing its heroes long before Moore started writing. Peter Parker, after all, was a terrible dork.

Nonetheless, Moore took the genre to grand new vistas in psychology, political commentary and literature (see, for a mere taste, Eve Tushnet’s sprawling essay comparing it to Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure [link for Tushnet's essay requires you scroll down a bit to Friday, January 23rd at 12:02am -- Ed]). Watchmen is a brilliant accomplishment and deserves the bulk of its sometimes gob-smackingly good press. Though I’ll leave it to others to debate whether it belongs on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels since 1923 (the only graphic novel on the list). But the man’s influence on comics and Hollywood has been enormous, if not necessarily obvious to folks who don’t know who he is or only know him from the movie adaptations of V for Vendetta or From Hell. Whedon’s own Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel can easily be seen as Moore’s grandchildren.

This March, after decades of typical Hollywood rigmarole and creative argy-bargy, the film adaptation of Watchmen is finally going to hit screens and Watchmen-mania is running its course like a particular bad case of fanboy (and fangirl) St. Vitus’ Dance. I’m very excited to see it myself. But lots of people, starting with Moore himself, simply don’t believe Watchmen will work as a movie. My fingers are crossed, but I think they have the better part of the argument.  

Regardless, if for no other reason than this is a new blog at the intersection of politics and Hollywood, there’s one thing that should at least be pointed out: Much of the political vision of Watchmen – and Watchmen was a deeply political piece of work – is horribly outdated today and was, in the grand scheme of things, just plain wrong when it came out. Moore intended the book to be at least in part a biting indictment of Reagan and Thatcher and the Cold War in general. He saw the book as explicitly anti-Reagan, if not necessarily anti-American (Reagan doesn’t actually appear in Watchmen).

This exposes one of the problems with Moore’s political vision: he seems to think the Cold War was a purely Reaganite phenomena that descended on America like a dark curtain thanks in part to the death of JFK. In Moore’s alternative universe Richard Nixon, a stand-in for Reagan, is serving out his fifth term as president. The title “Watchmen” is an allusion to a real JFK speech – “We are the watchmen of freedom” – that was never delivered because of the assassination, which in Moore’s alternate reality was probably masterminded by Nixon. It’s never said outright, but it’s strongly suggested that everything went wrong geopolitically after that. For example, JFK apparently wouldn’t have approved the use of superheroes in Vietnam (superheroes being something of a stand-in for nuclear weapons in this case. It’s complicated.).

But this is nonsense. Kennedy was an outright Cold War hawk who ran to Nixon’s right in 1960 on such issues as the “missile gap.” While Nixon certainly had very solid anti-Communist credentials, when he actually became president, Nixon ended the Vietnam War, recognized Communist China and ushered in an era of détente with the Soviets.

But that’s a nitpick about what may be a defensible thematic device. The real problem with Moore’s anti-Reaganite vision is that it places the blame for the omnipresent climate of fear on Reagan himself. (Apparently, Moore was unaware of, say, the Kennedy-era “duck-and-cover” ads). In the 1980s the greatest fear-mongering could be found not in Reagan’s “Morning in America” themes but in left-wing critiques like Moore’s. Films like the British “Threads“ or the watered-down American made-for-TV movie “The Day After,” were far more relentless in scaring the hell out of people than anything Reagan ever said or did. This was the deliberate tactic of the SANE Freeze crowd in and out of Hollywood, which thought it was their duty to make Americans more scared of their own government than they were of the Soviets. And the miasma of conspiratorial phobias that hangs over Watchmen’s universe is one that suggests Western governments were not only to blame for Cold War tensions, but that Western governments were actually the real villains.

This is not to say that Moore’s vision is cartoonish or even comic-bookish. It is deadly serious and he leaves many things open to diverse interpretations. Indeed, the greatest villain of the book is an idealistic, liberal-leaning, megalomaniac. But the existential angst and moral nihilism that serves as the spine of the book isn’t a product of Reaganism, but of the left’s ill-advised, ahistoric, and self-indulgent response to Reaganism. And, oh yeah: let the word go forth that Reagan’s vision proved correct barely a few years after Watchmen’s release. Meanwhile, Moore’s political vision – in part because it was so wrong – seems like 80’s kitsch today, which may be one of the reasons so many people believe the book is untranslatable to the big screen. Again, I hope the naysayers are wrong about that. I also hope the producers don’t try to cram the story into today’s left-wing critiques of the war on terror either which would, in a stroke, prove the naysayers right.

Nonetheless, Moore took the genre to grand new vistas in psychology, political commentary and literature (see, for a mere taste, Eve Tushnet’s sprawling essay comparing it to Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure [link for Tushnet's essay requires you scroll down a bit to Friday, January 23rd at 12:02am -- Ed]). Watchmen is a brilliant accomplishment and deserves the bulk of its sometimes gob-smackingly good press. Though I’ll leave it to others to debate whether it belongs on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels since 1923 (the only graphic novel on the list). But the man’s influence on comics and Hollywood has been enormous, if not necessarily obvious to folks who don’t know who he is or only know him from the movie adaptations of V for Vendetta or From Hell. Whedon’s own Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel can easily be seen as Moore’s grandchildren.

This March, after decades of typical Hollywood rigmarole and creative argy-bargy, the film adaptation of Watchmen is finally going to hit screens and Watchmen-mania is running its course like a particular bad case of fanboy (and fangirl) St. Vitus’ Dance. I’m very excited to see it myself. But lots of people, starting with Moore himself, simply don’t believe Watchmen will work as a movie. My fingers are crossed, but I think they have the better part of the argument.

Regardless, if for no other reason than this is a new blog at the intersection of politics and Hollywood, there’s one thing that should at least be pointed out: Much of the political vision of Watchmen – and Watchmen was a deeply political piece of work – is horribly outdated today and was, in the grand scheme of things, just plain wrong when it came out. Moore intended the book to be at least in part a biting indictment of Reagan and Thatcher and the Cold War in general. He saw the book as explicitly anti-Reagan, if not necessarily anti-American (Reagan doesn’t actually appear in Watchmen).

This exposes one of the problems with Moore’s political vision: he seems to think the Cold War was a purely Reaganite phenomena that descended on America like a dark curtain thanks in part to the death of JFK. In Moore’s alternative universe Richard Nixon, a stand-in for Reagan, is serving out his fifth term as president. The title “Watchmen” is an allusion to a real JFK speech – “We are the watchmen of freedom” – that was never delivered because of the assassination, which in Moore’s alternate reality was probably masterminded by Nixon. It’s never said outright, but it’s strongly suggested that everything went wrong geopolitically after that. For example, JFK apparently wouldn’t have approved the use of superheroes in Vietnam (superheroes being something of a stand-in for nuclear weapons in this case. It’s complicated.).

But this is nonsense. Kennedy was an outright Cold War hawk who ran to Nixon’s right in 1960 on such issues as the “missile gap.” While Nixon certainly had very solid anti-Communist credentials, when he actually became president, Nixon ended the Vietnam War, recognized Communist China and ushered in an era of détente with the Soviets.

But that’s a nitpick about what may be a defensible thematic device. The real problem with Moore’s anti-Reaganite vision is that it places the blame for the omnipresent climate of fear on Reagan himself. (Apparently, Moore was unaware of, say, the Kennedy-era “duck-and-cover” ads). In the 1980s the greatest fear-mongering could be found not in Reagan’s “Morning in America” themes but in left-wing critiques like Moore’s. Films like the British “Threads“ or the watered-down American made-for-TV movie “The Day After,” were far more relentless in scaring the hell out of people than anything Reagan ever said or did. This was the deliberate tactic of the SANE Freeze crowd in and out of Hollywood, which thought it was their duty to make Americans more scared of their own government than they were of the Soviets. And the miasma of conspiratorial phobias that hangs over Watchmen’s universe is one that suggests Western governments were not only to blame for Cold War tensions, but that Western governments were actually the real villains.

This is not to say that Moore’s vision is cartoonish or even comic-bookish. It is deadly serious and he leaves many things open to diverse interpretations. Indeed, the greatest villain of the book is an idealistic, liberal-leaning, megalomaniac. But the existential angst and moral nihilism that serves as the spine of the book isn’t a product of Reaganism, but of the left’s ill-advised, ahistoric, and self-indulgent response to Reaganism. And, oh yeah: let the word go forth that Reagan’s vision proved correct barely a few years after Watchmen’s release. Meanwhile, Moore’s political vision – in part because it was so wrong – seems like 80’s kitsch today, which may be one of the reasons so many people believe the book is untranslatable to the big screen. Again, I hope the naysayers are wrong about that. I also hope the producers don’t try to cram the story into today’s left-wing critiques of the war on terror either which would, in a stroke, prove the naysayers right.