Maggie Grace plays a kidnap victim whose father is a former spy in Taken.

2oth Century Fox / Stephanie Branchu

A divorced father and former master spy faces his worst nightmare in Taken when his 17-year-old daughter is kidnapped by white slavers during a Paris vacation.

The high-concept film was concocted by French producer/co-writer Luc Besson, who wrote and directed the ultra-violent hit-woman movie La Femme Nikita, and writer Robert Mark Kamen, whose scripts include Gladiator and Lethal Weapon 3 and who co-wrote the scripts for the Transporter movies with Besson as well as helping him with the script for the hit-man movie The Professional. If, from those credits, you’d expect a lot of violence and chaos in Taken, you would be correct.

The biggest surprise is that Liam Neeson, the cerebral Irish actor who once played heroic Oscar Schindler in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and sex therapist Alfred Kinsey in Kinsey, gets to smash his way through the unsavory sides of Paris in Taken, leaving a lot of bodies in his wake. But then Neeson also played Master Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace, not to mention sword-fighting Scottish hero Rob Roy.

So here he is as onetime spy Bryan Mills in a role that once might have been played by Harrison Ford. Using lightning moves and making split-second decisions, he chases a kidnapper in a stolen taxi at Orly Airport, leads a wild gun-firing chase through a construction site, leaps from a bridge onto a yacht sailing along the Seine to take on a boatload of thugs. Pummeled, shot and at one point chained to an overhead steam pipe where the tuxedo-wearing leader of a gang tells his accomplices to “Kill him quietly; I have guests,” Bryan uses his spy skills to turn tables and get out of the most dangerous situations.

Of course.

Although Taken has one breathtakingly thrilling moment after the next, like some old-time movie serial, Neeson’s low-key style and the fact that he keeps getting out of impossible situations makes the film seem too predictable and the results too easy. For all the grand-scale mayhem on screen staged by director Pierre Morel, Taken seems surprisingly small.

The script offers too blatantly simple a set-up to engage Neeson’s character: a long-absent father who has retired from the spy business so he could move to Los Angeles in hopes of reconnecting with his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). Despite his paranoid better judgment, he very reluctantly allows her to jet off to Paris with a girlfriend for a vacation. There, in the space of 20 seconds after standing in a taxi line at Orly, they are targeted by the kidnappers. After Bryan overhears the sounds of the kidnapping during a panicked phone call from Kim, he’s on the next plane to Paris.

What follows is a series of increasingly perilous encounters that will, Bryan hopes, lead him to Kim and save her from drugs and prostitution. The script unfurls these death-defying adventures with clockwork precision. It comes across as having been too carefully designed, leading to outcomes that are, unfortunately, too predictable.

**1/2Taken

Starring: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen.

Rated: R, contains violence, drug use, adult themes.