Tearing Down the Eiffel Tower: Post-9/11 Fears and Fantasies in Taken (Morrel, 2009)

As many scholars have observed, the defining action films of the 1980s, starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger can be persuasively seen as an articulation of and an engagement with Reaganite political philosophies and muscular representations of American power. What might the action films of the post-9/11 era reveal about the culture and the times in which they were made? This chapter attempts to ascertain how far the action genre incorporated the discourse of the ‘War on Terror’ into its narratives using Pierre Morel’s revenge thriller Taken (2008) as a case study revealing a genre which subsumed not only the prevalent fears and anxieties of the new millennium into its frames, but also its fantasies.