# I Will Find You And I Will Kill You "I Will Find You And I Will Kill You" is the menacing phone monologue delivered by Liam Neeson's Bryan Mills in the 2008 film Taken. After the movie hit U.S. theaters in January 2009, the line was clipped, screencapped, and rebuilt into one of the defining Liam Neeson image macros of the early 2010s. ## Origin The line comes from Taken, the English-language French action-thriller directed by Pierre Morel and written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. The film opened in France in February 2008 and reached U.S. theaters on January 30th, 2009[3]. In the scene, retired CIA operative Bryan Mills, played by Liam Neeson, picks up a phone call from the men who have just abducted his daughter and delivers a cold monologue that ends with the promise to find and kill them. On April 4th, 2009, roughly two months after the U.S. release, one of the earliest YouTube uploads of the phone call scene went online and eventually pulled in more than 800,000 views over its first five years[1][3]. - **Platform:** Film (Taken, 2008) / MemeGenerator (viral spread) - **Creator:** Luc Besson (screenwriter) and Liam Neeson (performer) - **Date:** 2009 ## Overview The meme is built almost entirely around one still frame: a close-cropped shot of Liam Neeson holding a phone, jaw set, mid-threat. Editors slap two-line captions on it in the classic top-and-bottom impact font style, usually a petty grievance up top and the punchline "...I will find you and I will kill you" underneath[3]. The joke is the mismatch between the actor's genuinely terrifying delivery and the trivial thing the caption is angry about, like a roommate finishing the milk or someone spoiling a TV show. The template belongs to the broader wave of celebrity reaction macros that dominated MemeGenerator, Imgflip and Quickmeme around 2012, alongside faces like Yao Ming and Bad Luck Brian[4][5]. Users pulled a handful of alternate stills from the same phone scene as extra blank templates so the same threat could be posed from different camera angles[3]. Even after the image-macro boom cooled, the phrase itself kept circulating as a copy-paste comeback in Reddit threads and comment sections[6]. ## How It Spread The catchphrase crossed from movie quote into meme format on January 30th, 2012, when a screenshot of the scene was uploaded to MemeGenerator under the title "liam neeson taken"[2]. The submission climbed to #256 on the site and spawned more than 32,000 caption variations over the next three years[3]. Through 2012 the same still bounced onto Imgflip and Quickmeme, where users kept iterating on everyday-annoyance punchlines[4][5]. The format's peak was late 2012, but the line kept a second life as a text-only heckle. Reddit search still surfaces the phrase turning up in comment threads years after the image-macro wave died down[6]. Liam Neeson himself leaned into the joke on March 8th, 2014, appearing in the Saturday Night Live cold open to deliver a Taken-style threat aimed at Vladimir Putin during the Crimea crisis, essentially performing the meme on live TV[3]. ## How to Use The typical build is simple: grab the phone-call still of Bryan Mills, drop a mundane complaint on the top line (a coworker, a roommate habit, a spoiler) and finish with a variation on "...I will find you, and I will kill you" on the bottom. Common convention keeps the threat clause intact and only edits the setup, so the punch comes from the gap between Neeson's straight-faced delivery and a completely low-stakes grievance. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is I Will Find You And I Will Kill You? It is a catchphrase and image macro built from Bryan Mills' phone-call threat in the 2008 film Taken, most often used with a still of Liam Neeson holding a phone[3]. ### Where did I Will Find You And I Will Kill You come from? The line was written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen and delivered by Liam Neeson in Taken, which opened in the U.S. on January 30th, 2009[3]. An early YouTube clip of the scene was uploaded on April 4th, 2009[1]. ### What does I Will Find You And I Will Kill You mean? In the film it is a real threat to kidnappers, but online it is used as a mock-serious overreaction to petty grievances, with the humor coming from the mismatch between Neeson's delivery and a trivial complaint[2]. ### How do you use I Will Find You And I Will Kill You? People typically caption the phone-call screenshot with a small annoyance on top and the "I will find you and I will kill you" line on the bottom, following the image-macro format popularized on MemeGenerator and Imgflip in 2012[2][4]. ### Is I Will Find You And I Will Kill You still popular? The image-macro wave peaked in late 2012, but the phrase itself is still used as a copy-paste heckle in Reddit and blog comment threads[3][6]. ## References 1. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmLRTVYgEq4]() 2. [https://memegenerator.net/Liam-Neeson-Taken]() 3. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-will-find-you-and-i-will-kill-you]() 4. [https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/I-Will-Find-You-And-I-Will-Kill-You]() 5. [https://www.quickmeme.com/Taken]() 6. [https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=I+will+find+you+and+I+will+kill+you]() 7. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT5CNaHchPY]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/i-will-find-you-and-i-will-kill-you Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library