Archive
Under-the-Radar Round Up 2019, Part I
As I have done for the past several years, I am pleased to present the first installment in my ongoing series of articles looking at the best “under the radar” scores from around the world. Rather than grouping the scores on a geographical basis, this year I decided to again simply present the scores in a random order, and so this first batch includes reviews of five disparate scores from the first four months of the year – including a French literary period drama, a French children’s animated film about insects, a Japanese murder-mystery thriller, a Swedish romantic drama, and a historical biopic from Switzerland! Read more…
TAKEN 3 – Nathaniel Méchaly
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Taken 3 (styled ‘Tak3n’) is the third and, likely, final installment of writer/producer Luc Besson’s series of modern revenge action-thrillers starring Liam Neeson in what is quickly becoming one of his iconic screen roles. After taking on Albanian human traffickers in Paris in the first film, and virtually the entire Albanian mafia in Istanbul in the second, Neeson’s character Bryan Mills is back home in Los Angeles for the third film, still doting on his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), and hesitantly re-kindling his relationship with his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), who is becoming increasingly estranged from her current husband Stuart (Dougray Scott). Bryan’s world falls apart when he discovers Lenore’s dead body in his own apartment, and soon he is running for his life, accused of a murder he did not commit, pursued by a dogged LAPD detective (Forest Whitaker), and trying to find the real killers, who appear to have something to do with a vicious band of Russian gangsters terrorizing the city. The film is directed by French action specialist Olivier Megaton, and has a score by the similarly Gallic Nathaniel Méchaly, who has scored all three Taken films to date. Read more…
TAKEN – Nathaniel Mechaly
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A xenophobic and downright nasty action thriller which somehow became a box office success, Taken is directed by Pierre Morel and stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, a former spy with ‘special skills’, who is forced out of retirement when his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) is kidnapped by a sex trafficking gang in Paris. Once in Europe, Mills runs around a lot and fights his way through the French underworld trying to save his daughter, encountering Albanian crime syndicates and evil Arab billionaires and delivering plenty of high octane energy and pithy-one liners, but it all leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, especially with its blatant “all foreigners are evil” undertone. Read more…
Shop at the Movie Music UK Store
Member of the
MOVIE MUSIC UK 