Robert J. Maxwell Every judgment is relative to something else. I was unhappy with the film because I expected more, based on a review I'd read. I'd expected more of a police procedural. Instead, it's the usual story of a young girl kidnapped, raped, and otherwise degraded by a smiling young maniac who drives her from her home in Kansas to Wyoming, while he quotes Robert Service. ("A bunch of the boys were whooping it up/ in the Malamut Saloon.") I wanted action, not fancy egghead LITerature! We can believe most, if not all, of her suffering. God knows we see enough of it. Sara Canning, as the real-life victim Anne Sluti, is beaten unconscious, bound with duct tape, blindfolded and teased, sexually violated, half drowned, and made to eat an oatmeal cookie. We don't learn much about James Van Der Beek, as Tony Zappa, except that he was raised by his Bible-thumping grandma, he is a genuine imbecile, and has been a bad boy all his life.Anne Sluti, on the other hand, is a good girl. She must be, otherwise there might be shades of gray in the movie, which we must avoid at all hazards. The point of the movie is to make the audience weep with sympathy and hate the perp. We don't want them to think. There are endless close ups of Anne Sluti's mother's anguished face. The actress, Diana Reis, seems to have been chosen for the role precisely because the default expression of her features seems to be "agonized preoccupation." And I could almost hear, in my mind's ear, the writers wishing ruefully that the real-life heroine could at least have had a more proper name than "SLUTI". I mean -- after all. Couldn't she have at least been given a decent name? Like Angelica Primrose?Some of the story, though it's supposed to be real, I simply can't swallow. The villain, Tony Zappa -- that's a proper name for a heavy, and it must have made the writers glow with satisfaction -- forces his captive to make a phone call home, claiming that she simply decided to take off on her own and she wasn't kidnapped. She tells the waiting police, who are taping every word, that "it was time for equality vacation." The cops twig to it at once. It's not a slip of the tongue, not a parapraxis, it's a clue. "Equality." And one of the states next door is Wyoming, whose motto is "The Land of Equality." So that's where she is now -- in Wyoming. A thousand far-flung dots are connected in an intant. I don't believe it. Do you? You have never seen such suffering. Except in every other movie ever made about young women in jeopardy.

Kristen Cerone I feel that Taken in Broad Daylight was a well-put together crime film. From the beginning, I was drawn in by the immediate trauma that was the kidnapping of Anne Sluti. I wanted to know what would happen next and more importantly, why Tony Zappa took her in the first place. There was a constant mystery throughout the whole film of whether or not she would be saved and see her family again. This kept wondering and interested in what would happen in the next scene. Furthermore, the constant fearful emotions were very relevant for the audience because these types of feelings are what anyone would feel if they were in the position of Anne Sluti. Also, the movie allowed me to use my psychological mind to dissect the actions of the perpetrator and try to determine why he committed his crime. Gary Yates did a great job of putting together a film that would thoroughly expose our fears of violent crime such as kidnapping and allowing the viewers to put themselves in the position of the main characters and truly feel the agony that they were feeling.

SnoopyStyle 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.

edwagreen Although this is a true story and the victim showed her mettle, there is really nothing basically outstanding in this film which seems to drag on and on.A much older LeVar Burton does shine as the police officer, a friend of the victim's family, who helps lead the way to her eventual freedom.A nightmare begins when a recently accepted to college young lady is kidnapped at random in a parking lot by a lunatic, abused by his father, living with a fanatically religious grandmother, and arrested over 20 times for a variety of offenses. The guy is totally off the wall and kidnapped our unfortunate girl as he was lonely.Ready to kill her several times, she was able to talk her way out of it and you see that the guy may be falling for her until the very last scene-the usual come out and put your hands up.When you think of it, as difficult as this movie is, it is really routine.