Turbo: Help Me Qui-Gon Jinn. You're My Only Hope! Again!

I'm far from perfect. I can admit that. I've broken some rules. I've broken some laws. I've seen bootlegged movies. But if I never had, then I wouldn't have discovered the brilliance that was Taken.

Taken came to British theaters many months before the U.S. had even heard of it. I had been hearing great buzz about the movie from across the pond, and a friend of mine happened upon a download and I may have been in the room when he played it. Screw it, I watched it. And for my British friends, it was bloody brilliant.

It was violence where it was welcomed. Human traffickers are the lowest scum on earth, so they are always open to the most brutal display of violence inflicted on them, whenever possible. Liam Neason's former federal agent with a "certain set of skills" keeps you cheering from the first bullet to the last as he hunts down his daughter before she's lost forever. Months later I paid to see the movie in American theaters and left the theater utterly disappointed. The British got a well-paced, violent and righteous movie. We got a watered-down choppy version to suit American sensibilities.

Nail, meet thigh.

Think back, if you will, to the version you saw. There's a scene in a basment where Marko is tied to a chair. What happens next? In the American version Liam Neason attaches a car battery to the chair. In the British version he first drives two ten inch nails into the man's thighs and then attaches the car battery to those. See the difference? It seems small but these types of changes are scattered throughout the movie. But we're here to talk about the second one aren't we?

Well I'm sure he still has his skills and this time it's his ex-wife who's taken. Who cares though, right? He loves her enough to not want her dead and so he's off on another adventure to hunt down and take out the people who took his ex. I don't see her current husband making it out of this one alive. The last one had no good guys die, and we need a loss this time around for some more emotional something or other. I'll wait to hear if they had to re-edit this one for American audiences again before I decide which version to check out.