I recently watched the movie Hardcore (1979) and it made me think of Taken (2008), a very similar film. Each deals with a daddy who has to go out into the big, bad dangerous world and rescue his daughter from those who’ve taken her.
In Taken, Bryan Mills’ daughter is kidnapped and sold into white slavery and it’s up to him and his fists to get her back from the men who took her. In Hardcore, god-fearing Midwesterner Jake VanDorn (George C. Scott) searches for his daughter who’s caught in the porn industry in California. While Taken is an rough and tumble action flick, Hardcore is more a study in the dirty, seedy side of California.
But there’s something missing from Taken that is dealt with in Hardcore; for the father to rescue the daughter lots and lots of other girls in the same situation have to be left to their own fates.
In Hardcore, VanDorn finds help from porn actress/prostitute Niki (Season Hubley) in searching for his lost girl. But at the end of the film, when he finds his daughter and the two are leaving California for Michigan, there is a moment where Niki comes to the start realization that helpful or not, she’s going to be staying in California and the VanDorn family are going home to Michigan.
In Taken, at one point Mills searches a prostitution den and in another scene finds a building full of drugged girls chained to beds in search of his daughter. But when he doesn’t find her time and time again he leaves the other girls behind in the same situation he’s trying to save his daughter from.
I think the message of Taken is that if your a girl who’s been kidnapped and your dad isn’t Liam Neeson with his “special set of skills” then you’re SCREWED!
