Liam Neeson Almost Turned Down Iconic Taken Scene Thinking It Was Too Cheesy

Though mostly lambasted by professional critics, this film was loved by the audience, made over nine times of its $25 million budget at the box office, and spawned a couple of successful sequels.

In Taken, Neeson played an ex-Secret Service agent who has to find and rescue his teenage daughter after she gets kidnapped by sex trafficking mobsters while visiting Paris.

The plot is very simple (which at least in part explains disdain felt by critics) and serves mostly to set up hardcore action.

"I was very surprised by 'Taken'," Neeson himself admitted. "I thought it was going to be a straight-to-video film. It was such a simple story."

As it happens, even simple stories like Taken can be appreciated, but the script also was quite corny, in the vein of action movies from 80s.

And the corniest moment, at least from Neeson's viewpoint, was the speech his character, Bryan Mills, delivered right at the end of his daughter's kidnapping scene, when she tried to call him for help, and he realized that one of the criminals is now holding the phone.

He told the criminal: "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".

Of course the mobster only replied with "good luck", otherwise there would be no movie.

Liam Neeson felt that "It was a cornball." He even asked for the whole scene to be removed at one point. But clearly the audience felt that the speech, as delivered by him, sounded properly intimidating.

As he says: "It's nice to be proven wrong."