Sweet Revenge: Why Are We So Obsessed With Revenge-Flicks Like ‘Taken?’

Taken 3 has an abysmal 11% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes, but it’s still the number one film in the country. The revenge flick raked in an estimated $40.4MM this week, meaning that a lot of people didn’t care if it was good or bad. A lot of people simply wanted to see Liam Neeson avenge his wife’s death by killing a bunch of people.

The Taken franchise holds a unique position in modern cinema because it basically affirms that people are obsessed with the idea of revenge. Granted, this is not a new notion in entertainment. As I pointed out last week, Neeson’s character, Bryan Mills, shares the moral ambiguity of class revenge play protagonists from the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. These are men (and women) who have been wronged, but choose to eschew moral codes and human laws in order to exact their justice. What usually follows is a bloodbath that causes more harm than good. The thing is, our basic human desire for sweet vengeance goes back further. The Ancient Greeks played with the allure and the folly of revenge in classic dramas like The Oresteia.

Revenge stories have always been popular. We’ve all wanted to live out the fantasy of hurting the people who have hurt us. So, there’s catharsis to be had in seeing someone like Liam Neeson knock off a couple of surly Albanians. However, something has shifted in the modern era. In classical theater, if a character took justice into their own hands, he or she was doomed to also feel the blow of vengeance by those they had wronged. Violence begat violence, death sprung from death, and the message was that you can’t take justice into your own hands.

This is complex idea is sometimes addressed in modern cinema. In Kill Bill, Vol. 1, there’s a beautiful scene where The Bride (Uma Thurman) realizes that Vernita Green’s (Vivica A. Fox) daughter witnessed her mother’s murder. While The Bride was seeking vengeance in her own right, she soberly recognizes that what she has done is wrong. In fact she tells the little girl, “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.” Usually, however, the hero of a revenge film literally gets away with murder. Case in point: the Taken trilogy, the Death Wish series, Django Unchained, etc.

What a lot of these “positive” revenge films have in common is that they are all about men seeking vengeance for harm brought to their wives and daughters. In classical Greek and Elizabethan revenge plays, a man’s destiny was not supposed to be in his own hands; justice was the provence of gods and kings. In modern Western society, we live with the assumption that we have a say in what’s fair and what’s right, and so I have to wonder if the idea that we all have a voice in society has given us the prerogative to root guiltlessly for the vigilante who takes the law into his or her own hands. Or maybe we just want to live in a fantasy world where we can kill people without recourse?

Basically, it looks like there are two types of “revenge” films. There are cautionary revenge tales, that urge us to not give in to our basest impulses, and then there are revenge fantasy films that indulge our deepest desires to murder everyone and not suffer any sort of consequences.

Given that, here are some classic revenge stories that you can check out if you’re craving some sweet vengeance.

Where To Stream Cautionary Revenge Tails: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Vengeance Trilogy: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance

Where To Stream Revenge Fantasy Films: Death Wish, Taken, Taken 2, Django Unchained, Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2

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[Photos: Everett Collection]