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Bryan Mills: I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

???: Good luck.

A 2008 rescue thriller produced by French auteur Luc Besson.

AKA "The Bourne Paternity".

Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a former special-forces commander attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughter Kimmy, who is currently living with her remarried-to-a-millionaire mother. He took up the job of being a bodyguard to help pay the bills.

Things turn ugly when Kimmy is kidnapped by Albanian sex-traders on a trip to Paris on her 17th Birthday.

Bryan courteously warns his daughter's captors that he has "a particular set of skills that will make their lives very miserable" and that he will kill all of them if they do not let her go.

The Albanians foolishly ignored his warning.

Bryan was not bluffing when he claimed to be a frighteningly skilled old warrior whose brutality would make Jason Bourne seem like a pussycat in comparison.

Hell hath no fury like a father protecting his little girl, as the underworld of Paris soon learns the hard and painful way.

A sequel is in the works.

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This movie provides examples of:

• Acceptable Targets: Apparently the French, who produced this film, still don't like Albanian immigrants.
  • And sex traders/human traffickers, but it'd take an especially oozy bleeding-heart to feel sorry for them over the poor women they abduct.
  • Possibly also the Swiss and Muslims, referring to Patrice St. Clair and the sheik in the final showdown.
  • Plus French law enforcement.
    • Luc Besson has a similar attitude to the French justice system as American 80s action films have to the US justice system: the "establishment" (judges, prosecutors and police chiefs) are impotent or corrupt, but one or two Cowboy Cops can strike a telling blow for justice.
• Actor Allusion: Liam Neeson has to meet some slave-traders whose base of operations is called "Paradise."
• Bad Cop Incompetent Cop: Pretty much the whole force seen in the film.
• Badass Boast: The opening quote for this page. Too bad for the Albanians who thought he was joking.
• Badass Grandpa: Bryan's pushing 60, but can still waste a dozen villains half-his-age without breaking a sweat.
• Badass Longcoat: In some of the publicity shots and part of Bryan's outfit for much of the film.
• Bald Of Evil
• Black And Grey Morality: Bryan is supposed to be the good guy, but he has this habit of leaving people to die in agony after extracting all the information possible from them, shooting innocent bystanders and threatening people's families.
• Chaotic Good
• Complete Monster: The Albanian sex-slave traders have zero redeeming features whatsoever.
• Crowning Moment Of Awesome: "You don't remember me, do you? We spoke on the phone two days ago. I told you I'd find you"
• Dawson Casting: 25-year-old Maggie Grace as 17-year-old Kim.
• Death By Sex: Kim is a virgin, as the plot goes out of its way to note. Amanda apparently isn't, and was looking forward to having fun abroad If You Know What I Mean. Guess who dies?
• Determinator: By the end of the movie, Bryan has a bullet wound, multiple knife wounds, been beaten in fisticuffs pretty badly by The Dragon, and most likely has a broken ankle, and still manages to massacre every Mook on the yacht. And that's just the last action sequence.
• Dirty Coward: The young "recruiter" guy, Peter.
• Distressed Damsel: Poor Kim...
  • Kim may also be the Damsel Scrappy. It's difficult to sympathize with her when she drops her father's gift on the ground to go ride a horse, lies to get Bryan to sign off on her trip, and then ignores the rules and precautions she promised to abide by.
    • Considering she's a girl from Southern California, I'm just glad that she seems to be on very good terms with Bryan. That, and, you know, secret agent fathers in movies generally always start out having a bad relationship with their children because they're "never home", so Kim's not so bad in this regard.
    • After her ordeal, she'll never disobey her father again.
• The Dragon
• Fridge Logic: Brian plays the "Good luck" recording over to himself on the plane to Paris. The mobster said "Good luck" after he removed the recording device.
• Electric Torture: Played terrifyingly straight. And averts the trope association of there not being any visible wounding, the electric current is being run into the mook by nails shoved directly into his thighs.
• Enhance Button: One of the clues he follows is a memory card from his daughters broken cell phone. He finds a picture with a reflection of someone following them around. He doesn't zoom in much, but he is able to enhance it to get a good look at his face.
• Evil Foreigner: With two exceptions, everyone foreign over the age of six is Evil.
  • Well, most of the foreigners the main character interacts with are in the human trafficking business, and in today's day and age, you'd have to be some sort of saint not to think of them as evil.
• Expy: The movie has been compared with Twenty Four; Bryan is Jack Bauer, Kim is Kim Bauer, Lenore is Teri Bauer. When Kim is kidnapped, Bryan's CIA friends say that analysts give them ninety-six hours (four days) before Kim disappears completely. Jean-Claude resembles Christopher Henderson, considering that both went from agents to desk jobs, both had their wives shot by the Bryan/Jack to force Jean-Claude/Christopher to give up information, and both tried to shoot Bryan/Jack with a gun that the Bryan/Jack had already taken the bullets out of. Oh, and Xander Berkeley, who plays George Mason, plays Stuart, Kim's stepfather. Oh and Amanda's Janet York.
• Foe Tossing Charge: Essentially the entire movie.
• For The Evulz: The villains actually REFUSE to sell Bryan's daughter to him, because that wouldn't be evil enough.
  • He just waylaid two of their employees, pulled a gun on one of their clients, and he didn't look like he had an extra $250,000 on him. Makes sense from the bad guy's perspective.
• Go Go Enslavement: With an unpleasantly appropriate justification.
• Groin Attack
• Hey, It's That Guy: This Troper had trouble accepting Broots as a badass ex-special-forces guy.
  • On the other hand, try picturing Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn, Ra'as Al'Ghul, your dad, Godfrey, or Jesus (aka. "Qui'Ghulfrey Jesus"), and the whole movie just becomes even more awesome.
  • Wow, Trish Wellington's been having a bad couple of years!
• HSQ If you did not walk out of the Movie Theater going "Dude..." then you watched the wrong movie.
• I Know Kung Fu: Or Krav Maga, the Israeli military martial art, to be exact.
• ILLKILLYOU
• It Works Better With Bullets: In one of the trope's finest-ever uses.
• Its Personal: "It was just business, Nothing Personal!" "It was all personal to me." *BANG*
  • Carries much more weight in the Harder Cut where it's *BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, casually tosses empty gun onto dead body*
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Oh, the Electric Torture.
  Bryan: "I need you to be focused!" (slams nails into man's thights) ARE YOU FOCUSED YET?!
• Jitter Cam: Thankfully not to the extent of the Bourne movies, but yeah.
• Karmic Death: Possibly good luck for the Dirty Coward, since as we see later, it prevented him from being 'interrogated'.
• Knight Templar Parent
• Le Cops Sportif
• The Man Behind The Curtain
• Mooks
• My Girl Is Not A Slut: Kim's virginity has friggin' plot armor.
• Never Bring A Knife To A Fist Fight: The guy threatening the singer. Mistaaaake! But subverted when The Dragon, after bringing out a knife, is only defeated subsequent to wounding Bryan some.
• Nightmare Fuel: See Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique.
• Not So Fast Bucko: It looks like Kim is about to be saved only for Bryan Mills to find out his princess is in another castle.
• Oh Crap: the look on the man's face when Bryan says to him "I told you I would find you."
• One Man Army: The main character goes through an underground sex-trafficking crime ring the same way Leon Kennedy goes through a Spanish peasant village.
• Overprotective Dad
• Papa Wolf: The plot of this movie
• Properly Paranoid: The Overprotective Dad is proven absolutely right in every way to have tried forbidding his daughter from traveling overseas, as well as the conditions he sets when he finally allows her to go.
• Punch Clock Villain: Patrice tries to paint himself this way, but fails to convince Bryan.
• Reality Ensues
• Retired Badass: Bryan
• Rich Bitch: Bryan's ex-wife. We're told that she has good reason for not liking Bryan, but she winds up looking spiteful and manipulative instead.
  • Pop star Sheerah initially seems like this when, upon being asked by Bryan if she can give his aspiring-to-be-singer daughter any tips, she responds, "Tell her to pick another career." It's later revealed after Bryan saves Sheerah from an attacker that she meant it as a warning, as a lucrative career in the music industry is "not what everyone thinks it is". She ends up giving the number of her vocal coach and her manager to Bryan when he simply responds, "That's what she wants."
• Roaring Rampage Of Revenge
• Scary Black Man: He appears just long enough to get his ass completely handed to him by Bryan.
• Shoot The Dog: Shooting Jean Claude's innocent wife. But it was Only A Flesh Wound so it's okay.
• So Beautiful Its A Curse: Literally for Kimmy and Amanda, who get targeted by the Albanians because they're hot and can fetch a lot of money as sex slaves.
• Talk To The Fist: Or 'bullet' as the case may be.
• Too Dumb To Live: The villains switch from smuggling in and enslaving illegal immigrants to kidnapping several rich white foreigners PER DAY, and from luring their targets to abandoned buildings to nabbing them out of their rooms WHILE THEY ARE ON THE PHONE
  • No mention of Kim and Amanda? The idiots accepted a car ride with a complete stranger in a foreign country, then told that stranger that they'd be alone in their apartment. Really, the kidnapping was Natural Selection at work.
  • Let's not forget the fact that they totally took Byran's threat lightly...
• Tranquil Fury
• Try And Follow: Done semi-successfully by one of the mooks Bryan tracks down.
• Unfortunate Implications
• Unstoppable Rage
• Why Dont You Just Shoot Him
• Your Princess Is In Another Castle: Practically the movies entire premise

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