In Which Oskar Schindler Punches Foreigners

One of the truly interesting things about Taken, the new joint from Liam Neeson and the guy who made the much-lauded (but as-yet-still-unseen-by-me) French action flick District B-13, is that such a multi-national cast managed to make a movie so wholly rooted in the American tradition of xenophobic paranoia. Neeson plays a negligent ex-CIA dad looking to re-connect with his virginal, estranged daughter (Lost's Maggie Grace), who - in the quickly-dispensed-with exposition - is whisked off from L.A. to Paris by an imprudent friend, and promptly kidnapped (and sold to high-level international pimps) by gangsters of a suitably ominous and anonymous (Albanian!) national origin. Since he's both negligent and ridiculously over-protective, Neeson immediately applies his special CIA freaky-styley to the situation, combating a range of furners (ranging from corrupt French bureaucrats to the henchmen of Arab sheiks), slowly slicing, bashing, and shooting his way down to the guys at the top holding his daughter.

Already, we have a pretty potent array of awesome moral lessons to be taken from Taken:

1) Your shotgun-toting dad, who kept you under lock and key to preserve you from unexpected assaults on your fortress of chastity? Guess what? He was totally right!

2) Any highly-trained American operative has the wherewithal to best dozens of (presumably) moderately-trained brown-skinned sorts in hand-to-hand combat, and the wherewithal to escape unscathed and unarrested from the mayhem he's caused.

3) Torture totally works! (Incidentally, I just figured out what Taken really is: a condensation of the first season of 24! Really! Maggie Grace's character is named "Kim" and everything! How did they not notice this?!)

4) Lastly, do not travel, ever. Instead of heading for the dangers of Western Europe, you're better off staying in that famed idyll of security, Los Angeles.

Despite being regressive, ridiculous, and derivative, I am ashamed to admit that Taken - when taken on its own slightly-odious terms - works like gangbusters. The director, Pierre Morel, obviously knows his way around a heart-pounding, bone crunching flight scene. And Neeson's commitment to this nonsense elevates the movie to a level of quality it doesn't deserve; in this role, his humorlessness and his intensity counterbalance the film's profusion of absurdities. Even while the early expository scenes don't entirely work, the sight of Neeson standing uncomfortably at his daughter's ritzy SoCal birthday party perfectly conveys what's going on. With his unkempt hair, and his ostrich-like, oversized Piers Plowman frame, he projects a sense of being out of place - beyond looking lost amid the party's surface-obsessed excess, he looks like he's been beamed in from a more rigid, righteous historical era.