"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."

—Liam Neeson, Taken

Taken is the rare case of a movie franchise that has grown out of a single speech. It's one of few films whose fans quote not just lines but whole blocks of text from the script. Liam Neeson has largely taken over from Harrison Ford in the "family in jeopardy" genre on the strength of that single scene. At least Ford's thrillers from the 1990s bothered to come up with separate plots and characters. With this weekend's Taken 3, the absurdity of the films' repetition has passed a new threshold. We get it: The women need saving. Here's the man to do it. Car chase ensues. Fistfight follows the car chase. By this point, the Secret Service would have been called out.

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Still, the speech from the original Taken (2008) was brilliant, and it was brilliant in a way almost never seen in the movies. It was a classically structured piece of rhetoric, a Tarantino-style soliloquy but drained of comedy. Aristotle would have loved this speech. And it follows the same structure and uses the same techniques as two of the greatest speeches of the 20th century, albeit ones much more important than what's found in a popcorn flick: Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches"and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."

These speeches are incredibly similar even though the situations from which they emerge could not be more different. The speakers repeat phrases ("I will," "We shall," "I have a dream"). Those phrases are predictive; spoken in the future tense. The speeches are very simply expressed, with almost no big words. They combine the abstract ("particular set of skills," "growing confidence and growing strength," "the Lord shall be revealed") with physical details ("I will find you and I will kill you," "we shall fight in the hills," "little black boys and black girls"). They are also delivered unbelievably slowly. Churchill and MLK spoke while facing desperate moments of public reckoning, Liam Neeson while beginning the second act of a middling international action movie. And yet the way of speaking—the technique—is exactly the same.

The reasons the Taken speech works so incredibly well, the reasons everyone remembers it, are the same reasons that people remember other great speeches: These rhetorical structures are built into the substructures of our consciousness and always work. The fact that the Taken speech happens to be an action movie shouldn't disguise its perfect craftsmanship. It's not so great that it deserved two sequels, maybe. On the other hand, it even works when you read it like Kermit the Frog:

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PLUS: The 15 Best Liam Neeson Movie Quotes Ever

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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