I was surprised to find myself choked up going through the supplements on this one. I missed the movie in first run, so I watched the Theatrical Cut included on the dual-layer, BD50 disc and will probably cue up the Extended Unrated Cut Digital Copy on my iPod at some point.
The Blu-ray features both cuts through seamless branching. The Extended Harder Cut (as it is in European releases) is only a couple minutes longer (93 minutes versus 91), so I'd wager the differences are snips here and there of violence. One of the attendees of the premiere put it best saying he was glad to see a French film at the pace and with the styling of an American one, and that's the best way to describe it.
The aforementioned Digital Copy (also on the 2-disc DVD) is only the Extended version, not Theatrical. Included extras are two Feature Commentaries, one with Director Pierre Morel and his dual cinematographers and the other with screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen. Le Making-of [HD 18:24] is just that, and gets the job done, but a more interesting production extra is found in Storyboard-to-Screen: "Inside Taken" [HD 11:05], where key action scenes are viewed in final form and behind the scenes. Black Ops Field Manual (exclusive to the Blu-ray) is the becoming-standard PiP popup fact track, including geographical info and trivia. Avant Premiere [HD 4:48], a taping of the French premiere event is the kind of thing I usually skip, but in the first few seconds, Natasha Richardson showed up on screen and I almost dropped the remote.
The thing friends and family who pay attention to Hollywood said after she passed was "how can he keep working?" A lot of people retreat into their work to assuage grief, and many actors are no different. Seeing how Neeson carried himself before the accident and after is indicative of how decent and humble a person he is, and that's why people will go see whatever he's in, be it a genre movie or a period drama.
With regard to the disc, it's well-done and worth grabbing. I hope no one who reads here would consider the bare-bones single-disc in the first place.
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