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Oh, he's Taken all right - Taken with kicking your ass! In Taken, Liam Neeson realizes he is Jodie Foster. (Jodie Foster, once upon a time, realized she was Harrison Ford.) These workaday Hollywood movieheroes might seem like you and me (not in any way at all), but do not take their spouse/child/significant person away from them. In some cases (Foster in Panic Room, Ford in Frantic), rage begets resourcefulness. In others (Ford in Patriot Games, and now Neeson in Taken), rage isn't even required, because resourcefulness is already plenty at hand: a "very particular set of skills," as Neeson puts it, has lain mythically dormant in these boiling cesspools of American don't-fuck-with-us-ness. They don't want to kill the shit outta you. But holy cow, they can.

Actually, the Taken of the title does not refer to any bloodlust on Neeson's part, but rather to Lost bikini-babe Shannon Grace, who at age 30 is here consigned to play a giddy tween, complete with jumping up and down while wearing pink, and cupcake-like squealing. For the first thirty minutes of the film - and boy, they are a long, long, long thirty minutes - we are stuck in some kind of Adam Sandler movie nightmare, where Neeson, as Grace's daddy, shuffles about helplessly, trying to give Daddy's Little Girl everything she wants, while shivering in the shadow of her new, rich step-daddy. Also featured: the once-lovely Famke Jannsen, as the mom/ex-wife who is so unsupportably dastardly that you actually hope she's behind the whole Taken plot, just so our man Liam can put two bullets in her in the final act. But no, that would defeat the point: there's no fun in killing her, when you can shame her, and prove she was a horrible mother - and a horrible woman - from before frame one. Her perfidy did, after all, sell her daughter into child prostitution. Bitch!

But then, mercifully, young daughter gets Taken, and we get going. Through plot labours to labourious to ennumerate here, lil' Kim gets kidnapped by Parisian sex-slavers, and that's when The Phone Call happens. You've heard of The Phone Call, because it is far and away Taken's finest moment, featured in all the trailers, the moment when the gasbag first act dies a flatulent death, and the real movie gets started. Because Liam Neeson has, once again, "a very particular set of skills." And they are now awake.

I would not go so far as to say that anything Neeson accomplishes in the next sixty minutes of screen time could actually happen in the real world or even in the bottom 70% of the most ludicrous movies ever made, but the nice thing about movie ludicrousity is that it's infinitely scalable, based on our own rude desires. If it pleases you to watch Liam Neeson coldbloodedly, nay Charles Bronsonly, kill his way across half of Europe in search of his abducted child-woman, then Taken will fill you to the gourd with awesometacularity, and you will give nary a shit about anything else. If you need any semblance of a credible plot or even a particularly original action frame - everything here is hastily cribbed from mid-range Bourne ripoffs - then avert your eyes, because Taken is not pleasurable enough on any terms other than Liam Neeson fanboy-fetishism to merit the investment, not even the purported Euro-cool thrillride of a hardass French action movie.

But this above all: do not take Liam Neeson's daughter away from him. If you do, then it is you who will be Taken.