So lately I’ve been watching a lot of old Steven Seagal movies. DVDs are frighteningly cheap here in China and I found a collection of every Seagal movie made from 1988 to 2009 for 30 yuan (a little less than $5). I have a peculiar love of bad action movies which I am at a loss to explain, although it makes for an apt description of this breathless new thriller starring Liam Neeson. Taken is like a really good Seagal movie without the bad acting, point-and-shoot direction and weak story. Essentially it’s just an angry revenge thriller but it gives us characters that we care about as much as can be expected in a movie like this and once it gets going it never lets up, and there’s nothing worse than a fast-paced action movie that drags.

Liam Neeson stars as Bryan Mills, a man living in semi-retirement in Los Angeles and spending his time barbecuing burgers with what I believe are old CIA buddies who tease him about retirement. We don’t learn a lot about Mills’ past, even his daughter knows little to nothing about it, but we do know that it involved some shady work for the government that forced him to trade his wife and daughter for a “particular set of skills” which would come particularly in handy were he to suddenly find himself starring in an abduction movie.

Mills’ daughter, Kim, is now living with her mother and step-father. We know nothing about the step-father except that he’s super-rich and an automatic enemy, since Liam is the father and, you know, everyone loves Liam. Unfortunately he’s been shafted by the government, who after years of service (that cost him his family) left him in a situation where he has to struggle to buy a cheap karaoke machine for his daughter’s 17th birthday. Mom and her new husband, meanwhile, give her what looks like a pure-bred racehorse and then send her off, get this, not on a trip to Paris but on a European vacation following the tour dates of U2 and staying in all the best hotels. Bryan is understandably bothered.

“All the kids are doing it,” mom tells him. Is that true? I didn’t know that. I was one of the poor kids at a pretty rich high school in southern California, but even back then I didn’t know this stuff was going on right under my nose! In fact, it wasn’t until Final Destination that I learned that some high schools sent their students to Paris on their senior trip. We were bused an hour north to Magic Mountain!

Bryan’s CIA experience has left him with a knowledge about the shady workings of the world that makes it impossible for him to accept his teenage daughter going to Europe with no one but her teenage friend to accompany her. He knows how irresponsible teenagers can be, he knows how dangerous it can be for young girls to travel alone, and maybe he saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona and he doesn’t want his daughter to become a second wife in a bizarre three-way Spanish marriage. At any rate, he understands that Europe does strange things to traveling Americans.

Because the plot needs to move things along, Bryan’s fears are proved justified as his daughter and her friend are abducted on the very afternoon that they arrive in Paris, and thus begins the preposterous but highly entertaining action thriller. Bryan happens to be on the phone with Kim when the abductors are in the house and is even able to speak to one of them. Using his CIA buddies for help, he manages to get incredibly detailed intelligence on the bad guys, and the hunt is on.

At it’s foundation, Taken is basically a Rambo-style film, a one-man army taking on this entire ring of human-trafficking Albanian gangsters with the French police and government on his tail. It’s one of those movies that asks us to believe that there are places where insanely rich executives from all over the world can go to purchase 17-year-old virgins for a few hundred grand to do with as they please. Do such places exist? I doubt it. It reminds me of the seedy underworld that Nicholas Cage meandered through as easily as a tourist visiting a dirty bookstore in 8MM, or the ridiculous torture-amusement scenario in Eli Roth’s relentlessly disgusting Hostel, which I’m officially suggesting to be one of the worst and most tasteless films ever made.

Taken, however, is good. The story takes place firmly in that imaginary world where any and all problems and mysteries are solved neatly within the required running time and it’s packed to the brim with Movie Miracles, but the story is engaging and well-paced and Liam Neeson brings his characteristic believability even to a movie that otherwise wouldn’t deserve it. He brings the focus and determination to the role that the movie needs to avoid sinking into action obscurity. It won’t be counted as one of the best action films of 2009, but it’s one of the better ones.

The Bean Meter

3.5 Beans out of 5.