Man goes to extreme lengths to prove once and for all that the movie Taken is a lie

A comedian has gone to great lengths to prove that the movie Taken is totally fake and would never happen in real life.

Obviously we're not talking about the parts where Liam Neeson runs around shooting people and gets away with no legal ramifications, that stuff is entirely plausible.

It might be helpful to refresh you on the plot of the movie, and maybe differentiate it in your mind from many of the other near-identical films starring Liam Neeson as a tough action hero.

The simple premise is that Bryan's (Neeson) daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) is touring round Europe following U2 when she gets kidnapped by sex traffickers.

Luckily for her, her father hears all of this on the phone and delivers a chilling monologue telling the kidnappers he'll leave them alone if they don't abduct his daughter, and promises to track them down and kill them if they ignore his warning.

The speech is so iconic that even people who've never watched the movie will know it, or at the very least have probably seen some sort of parody.

Cinematic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Obviously the kidnappers ignore his warning, leading Neeson to head off to Paris to track them down and kill them in increasingly dramatic action scenes.

Thrilling stuff, even if the series really suffered from diminishing returns with the sequels, but there are some who just can't buy the plot, and probably not for the reason you're expecting.

Comedian Josh Weller has laid the whole thing out in a vast conspiracy theory founded on one simple, undeniable truth; that no self-respecting teenage girl was listening to U2 in 2008, let alone following them on tour.

In an intrepid voyage of discovery to work out just what they were thinking making the whole plot hinge on a teenage girl being such a massive fan of U2, he called around the production companies which helped make Taken but was rebuffed in his efforts to find the truth, only fuelling the conspiracy further.

Sadly, Josh never managed to get to the bottom of this grand mystery and the question remains open to this very day.

TikTok/@joshwellerjoshweller

But plenty of others have taken up this conspiracy theory and are determined to get to the bottom of this.

One person suggested that the people who made the film, many of them middle-aged men, might have suffered from not being down with the youth of today (or 2008) and 'thought it was a cool band'.

More suggested that the choice of U2 was down to it being a band the movie's target audience, probably not teenage girls, would recognise when they heard the name.

While others are sure the creeping tendrils of 'big U2' and their influence over major stars like Taken lead Liam Neeson are the reason their band got name-checked in the movie.

Until someone official reveals the truth, I suppose we'll never know for sure.