About

"I will find you and I will kill you", also referred to as the Taken meme is a memorable quote said by the protagonist character in the 2008 action-thriller movie Taken. Online, this phrase, along with other excerpts from the intense monologue, has been adopted as a phrasal template for heckling comments, most typically in the form of reaction images.

Origin

Directed by Pierre Morel and written by Luc Besson, the English-language French action-thriller film Taken was initially released in February 2008, followed by the box office premiere in the United States on January 30th, 2009. In the film, the line is uttered by the protagonist character Bryan Mills (portrayed by Liam Neeson), a retired C.I.A operative and divorced dad in search of his missing teenage daughter, in a telephone conversation during which Mills speaks with the kidnappers of his daughter for the first time.

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.

On April 4th, 2009, a couple of months after the film's release in the U.S., one of the first YouTube clips featuring the dialogue scene was uploaded to the video-sharing site, gaining more than 800,000 views in the first five years.

Spread

On January 30th, 2012, a screenshot of the scene made its way to MemeGenerator in a submission titled "liam neeson taken"^[1], featuring an edited version of the catchphrase as a punchline dealing with various pet peeves that people face in everyday life and social media. The image macro ranked #256 on the site and went on to generate more than 32,000 instances of parodies over the course of the next three years. Throughout 2012, the meme continued to gain momentum as a popular reaction image on MemeGenerator, as well as other Reddit-affiliated image captioning services like ImgFlip^[4] and Quickmeme, ^[5] even spawning a few derivative blank templates based on still-shots of the character from alternative angles.^[2][3] While the online popularity of the image macro series seemed to have reached its peak in late 2012, the phrase in itself has seen continuous usage among hecklers in the comments section of blog posts and discussion threads.

Notable Examples

Saturday Night Live Parody

On March 8th, 2014, Liam Neeson, the British actor behind the quote, made a surprise cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live during the cold opening skit to deliver an intimidating message against Russian president Vladimir Putin in the wake of the 2014 Ukrainian-Crimean Crisis, entirely in the style of the original monologue featured in the film.

Blank Templates

Search Interest

External References