“Don’t get me wrong; I loved Liam Neeson in Taken. I just feel the writers of the movie missed an opportunity to add a love interest.
Bryan Mills, Neeson’s character in the movie, was single and spent the whole movie running around saving attractive females. Would it have killed him to ask someone out? Rescuing a girl from a drug-addled life of prostitution is a hell of an icebreaker. If you think Pretty Women stood the Romance genre on its ear, just imagine if Taken 2 had focused on the ups and downs of dating a former sex worker instead of yet another all-too-predictable abduction.
Taken 3 could have been the one where we learn she was the only girl in the sex trafficking ring of her own volition. Apparently, the only thing she loved more than drugs was sex.
Poor ol’ Bryan Mills. All the kung fu moves in the world can’t save him from a broken heart.
His heart was ‘taken’… get it?”
Alan the Clown leaned back in a high-back leather chair and waited to see the various reactions from the men and women seated with him at the long, expensive conference table.
Alan the Clown was dressed like everyone else at the table except he had on white face, a giant red smile, and a red nose. Everything about his face said clown, everything about his demeanor said not a clown.
Finally, someone spoke up. “I got two words for you Alan: Me and Too. Oh, and a third: Movement.”
“So you’re going to take another old successful movie and switch all the characters to female again? Lose another boatload of money to appease a bunch of pissed off women?” asked Alan flatly. “If that were the case, I wouldn’t be here.”
Alan knew deep down he was right.
When he was younger, he was a real clown. A proper one. Then finally he realized two things: 1) He liked to talk and 2) People prefer to hear the truth from clowns. Now he was the highest-priced clown in the country.
“So what’s the pitch here, Alan?” asked one of the other movie industry drones at the table.
“No pitch. Just an observation,” he replied.
Alan could have gone into politics. Given the current political climate, the country was practically begging for a clown, but the money was better in Hollywood.
“You can’t keep churning out the same crap. You have to take a few risks. You have to make people think.” When Alan was done talking, he looked around and saw a few heads starting to nod their approval.
The overweight man at the head of the table suddenly spoke up. “Challenge them!”
More heads started to nod.
“Even confuse them, right?” he continued.
“Yes!” someone young and weary-looking piped up enthusiastically.
“Wrong!” thundered the fat man, his chubby fists coming down loudly on the table. “Get that new guy out of here.”
The young and weary-looking man jumped up and fled the room and didn’t stop until he was back in Tulsa.
The man at the head of the table, who was head of the studio and a half a dozen other important interests, looked at Alan and snarled “Someone get that fucking clown out of here.”
Alan smiled, slowly stood up, bowed deeply and exited the room.
“Now,” said the man-who-would-be-fired-in-three-months-for-sexual-harassment-and-replaced-by-a-certain-clown, “Someone get me S. E. Hinton’s agent. I want to discuss making That Was Then, This Is Now with the Mark character being rewritten as transgender.”
“Brilliant,” someone exclaimed.
“Not confusing at all,” added someone else.
A woman in her early thirties thought about it for a few minutes and then retreated to the bathroom to splash water on her face. Her head swam for a good hour.