Taken in Broad Daylight

Poorly acted abduction compared to other kidnapping films. Was just constantly waiting for the film to end.

Anne Sluti (Sara Canning) is a 17 year old girl in Nebraska who gets kidnapped by a crazy Tony Zappa (James Van Der Beek). LeVar Burton plays police detective Mike Timbrook.

It's a slow moving Lifetime movie. The kidnapping is compelling but the story just drags along for far too long. There isn't enough depth in the story. James Van Der Beek isn't menacing enough. He just doesn't act crazy well. Maybe the investigation shouldn't be half the movie. Maybe if this was a tough character study of Zappa. Maybe it should be just a two person play. Maybe if the production value was more than the standard TV movie.

...but as a movie, it's simply far too long.

The "Plot" section above tells you _everything_ there is about this movie.

The acting is neither very good nor particularly believable. You can tell it is a true story because no script writer would write something with so much filler where absolutely nothing happens. Even a bad scriptwriter would write something to fill the time.

It's a compelling story and I watched it far longer than I normally would have watched something of this calibre, but I ultimately had to turn it off to keep from yelling at the TV, "For $%^&^ sakes, DO something!"

There are very few redeeming points in this 'made for T.V' drama about a high school senior who was kidnapped from a parking lot in Nebraska back in 2001.

Although the topic of this film is a fairly serious one, it is a huge disappointment in terms of writing, direction and acting. The movie starts out as a teenage high school drama, and ever so slowly and painfully gets worse and worse as it goes along. The dialogue is unbelievably and at best, poorly delivered. The most intense scene was a mind boggling cluster of bad lines, and inane acting, that it ruins any drama that should have been part of such a horrendous act.

Every part of this movie dissolves into your typical 'straight to video' movie.

2/10

This film is a lower budget endeavor and that's obvious from the start, therefore I wasn't really expecting to be excited or enticed to say it was a fantastical experience. I wasn't even going to leave a review but seeing that the only people who got on here to bother doing so were the whiny people who demand that everything be a Hollywood blockbuster, it seemed appropriate. It's obvious that van der Beek and Burton thought it was an important enough story to lend their well-known names to.

Because of this film, a lot of people were armed with information about what to do in a similar situation. I thought the acting was fine and in particular I thought van der Beek was a good choice to show that monsters don't necessarily look like monsters. This film isn't going to knock your socks off in the entertainment sense, but it is a harrowing account of what a teenage girl went through and, more importantly, lived through.

It's easy to criticize if you're coming from a place that expects a film to be written and directed as fiction, but critiquing what was said or done by the characters of a biographical drama seems a bit nonsensical.

My surprise was in seeing how Anne was so dominating and arrogant in the face of such a threat. But I can definitely understand that it takes a strong person to be that brave and that intelligent in such a situation. That's not to say that those who didn't survive a similar situation we're not brave or intelligent.

Sure there's things to criticize here because of the low budget and the short runtime. In particular I didn't like the song in the beginning of the film and I sarcastically thought to myself, well the kidnapping ended that torture. But the actors all did an acceptable job of reenacting a real life drama.

If this film doesn't make you feel emotional about the victims of people who kidnapp and abuse our young people, then you might want to go see the wizard about a heart.