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Taken is a movie about a government spook whose daughter is kidnapped abroad, so he tracks her down and kills everybody connected to her kidnapping. I'm not giving away anything by telling you that -- the plot is spelled out by the advertising campaign, which features the spook talking to his daughter's kidnappers and informing them, in a quiet and measured voice, that they will soon all be dead. Frankly, if the spook didn't do what he promised, there wouldn't be much of a movie. So there are no surprises in the film's plotting. For some critics, the surprise is in the casting. The spook, you see, is played by Liam Neeson, who pretty much everybody agrees is a very good actor, and sometimes even a very great one.

So there has been some consternation in critical circles that Neeson would degrade himself by appearing in trash like this, which I find puzzling. Haven't these critics followed Neeson's career? While you can't precisely fault the man for appearing in Batman Begins or Kingdom of Heaven or Krull, they're not high art, and he makes a lot of trashy actioners such as these. In fact, were it not for the fact that he occasionally appears in a movie like Kinsey or Les Miserables, which play to art houses, he would mostly be known as a big and grim-faced actor who can always be counted on to add a touch of depth and class to otherwise unremarkable genre films that feature a lot of action. Taken is not an aberration in Neeson's career, it's typical of his career. 

I guess people consider it a shame. After all, Neeson exudes gravitas. With his rugged features and rattling baritone, not to mention his huge frame and rough, masculine features, he seems like an actor who was made for great films. In the 1940s, there would have been an endless supply of well-crafted period pieces that require an actor of Neeson's caliber and physicality, but now they are relatively rare, and, as with Gangs of New York, they tend not to center around towering heroic figures, but young punks, and so Neeson tends to play an older mentor to a much less interesting younger lead, and often dies off relatively early, and the films are always poorer as a result.

So if Neeson doesn't want to spend his entire career teaching Orlando Bloom how to heft a broadsword or Christian Bale how to be Batman or Hayden Christensen how to be Darth Vader, he has to take roles in films like Taken every so often. As action films go, it's neither bad nor good, but has a few elements that are great fun and a few elements that are somewhat troubling. The film is loosely like Get Carter or Point Blank, two Seventies crime films about single-minded killers going about their task with ruthless efficiency, and Neeson's character is about as ruthless and efficient as anybody ever put on film. He is frequently ingenious about it -- in one scene, he bothers a prostitute on a Paris street until her Albanian pimp comes out to slap some sense into him. But this has all been a pretext for putting a microphone on the man, and Neeson quickly hurries back to his car, where he has a bewildered Albanian translator waiting. It doesn't take Neeson long to track down his daughter, and he is not nice to the men who took her, and that's what the film promised.

But the film starts off by making the villains Albanian immigrants to Paris who are involved in white slavery, and, later, we discover the whole thing is orchestrated by a porcine sheik with an army of kohl-eyed Arab assassins. Neeson is not above torturing a suspect to get what he wants, and so we end up with some queasy scenes in which an American soldier, trained as a spook, electrocutes or otherwise abuses a Muslim in order to get some information. (Never mind that Neeson is actually Irish; the film makes no mention of the fact, and you are just supposed to ignore it, despite his languid Northern Irish accent.) These scenes would seem like an apologia for American torture in the Gulf Coast, but for the fact that the film's writer and director, Luc Besson and Pierre Morel, are French. Presumably they are merely using Albanians the way American filmmakers use American minorities -- as a violent criminal underclass that can always be dispatched without fuss or concern. Nonetheless, the image of Liam Neeson as an American spy strapping high voltage lines to an Muslim prisoner is a distinctly queasy one.

It also points to a fault in the screenwriting. With both Get Carter and Point Blank, the main characters were irredeemable killers -- they are a product of the criminal world, and, when wronged, take their revenge. Neeson's character is not that. He is a former soldier who yearns to be a good father, and the film takes a lot of time establishing his concern and care for his daughter. So much time, in fact, that you never learn much about his past in the military, except that he is handy with hand-to-hand combat and considers his profession honorable. I think the filmmakers wanted to tell the story of a man with a violent past who has set it aside, but, when his daughter is kidnapped, gives in to his murderous impulses. Unfortunately, they forgot to tell that story. Instead, we end up with two Neeson's -- the good father and the clever, if brutal, killer. There is no transition from one to the other, and no sense that they might be the same man. So we end up with quite a lot of Neeson chasing down Muslims in Paris streets, and quite a lot of Neeson turning Arabs into bloody sides of beef, but very little of Neeson's journey as a character. And, without that, you don't need an actor, you just need a thug.

The critics were right about one thing. This film is beneath Liam Neeson.