"Taken" care of business with Stone Cold Liam Neeson

"Taken" is a satisfying and engrossing revenge fantasy. It's a fast-moving B-movie kind of a picture--maybe too fast-moving at times. It's immensely entertaining, though, and if you want to see Stone Cold Liam Neeson kick ass, you will get your wish.

OK, so Liam Neeson isn't exactly like Stone Cold Steve Austin, but give the beer-swilling WWE legend a few gadgets and the technical know-how to use them, a host of international contacts and resources, and the government intelligence background, and they're not so different. Neeson certainly uses his own presence and physical size to good advantage here; I never thought of the guy as a supreme fighting machine even in the "Star Wars" prequels, but here he is always credible.

Perhaps the best thing about "Taken" is that though it zips by through about an hour or so of Neeson's character searching for his kidnapped daughter, it takes its time getting to that point. Spending a half-hour or so on establishing the guy and his circumstances makes it even easier to root for the guy when the first act ends.

(I say "even easier" because just from seeing the ads and knowing a little bit about the movie, I came to "Taken" pumped up to see Neeson tee off on some criminal scum. Didn't take long before I turned to my wife and said, "Boy, I can't wait to see this guy kick somebody's ass.")

This guy is an ex-CIA operative whose devotion to his career kept him from his family and turned his ex-wife into a shrew (Sorry, Famke Janssen, but you don't get the Sympathetic Cinematic Spouse of the Year Award). Now he's reduced to hanging around in town hoping for some quality time with his daughter. On his birthday, his thoughtful gift is upstaged by the present she gets from her rich stepdad minutes later: a horse.

Hey, I think almost all us dads can identify with that fear. There are days I worry I might not be able to give my little girl a My Little Pony, let alone a dream gift like her very own steed. So I feel for Neeson, absentee father, or not, and after all he is clearly making the effort now. Plus he just seems like a cool fella, and he happens to be exactly right when he tries to tell his daughter not to go overseas to follow U2 on career (not that he's a Radiohead guy; he just doesn't want her to get abducted and sold into sex slavery by some despicable Euro sleaze--Oops).

So, yeah, once things get going, I'm totally on board with some good old-fashioned butt-kicking, and Neeson delivers. His businesslike demeanor and keen savvy make a great combo with his combat skills, and it's fun to see him tear through France. The fight scenes are sometimes shot with some of that annoying quick-edit, too-close kind of style, but overall you see enough of the action to feel like you're getting a good action movie experience.

It might sound strange to say a movie with this subject matter is fun unless you take it for what it is--a lean, mean, efficient revenge flick. Its surprising box office success will surely make a sequel tempting, and if they can make another one as unpretentious and non-bloated as this, it could actually work. The one thing this movie lacks is a bad guy on Neeson's level, but it works since it's basically Stone Cold Liam versus the system. A sequel might be worthwhile if Neeson gets to go head to head with a credible individual threat.