Liam Neeson makes use of that brawn in 'Taken'

In his 30-year career as an actor, Liam Neeson has played his share of priests, rogue Irishmen and sexy professors. He earned an Oscar nomination in 1994 for his portrayal of Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and, more recently, loaned his unmistakable baritone to Aslan the lion in "The Chronicles of Narnia" series. Though he's played killers and sea captains, Neeson always seemed to underplay his formidable physicality.

He's 6-foot-4, freakishly tall by Hollywood standards, and he spent much of his childhood in Northern Ireland training as a boxer, ultimately winning a teenage heavyweight championship. But in film, Neeson is often the gentle giant or the villain whose strength is only suggested, rarely demonstrated.

In the bare-knuckled thriller "Taken," opening Friday, Neeson uses every inch of his physique when taking on the role of a no-holds-barred action hero. His ex-CIA operative Bryan Mills cracks skulls and scales walls, steals cars and generally dispels the common presumption of Neeson as the thinking woman's sex symbol. There are no cerebral soliloquies here. In "Taken," Neeson has his Dirty Harry moment.

"Maybe it's a working class work ethic thing," said Neeson during a phone call last week, as he watched horse-drawn carriages circle Central Park from the window of his Manhattan apartment. "I like the feeling of physical activity. I feel I've done an honest day's work for an honest dollar."

The film is co-written and produced by Luc Besson, the French writer-director behind a litany of breathless but cerebral odes to shoot-'em-up action, most memorably 1990's "La Femme Nikita" and "The Professional," which marked Natalie Portman's pre-pubescent debut.

"Taken," directed by cinematographer Pierre Morel and co-written by Robert Mark Kamen, is often predictable and over-the-top, but the sheer audacity of the stunts and parent's-worst-nightmare plot makes the revenge thriller irresistibly compelling.

"With somebody else in this character, it may have seemed more frivolous," said Neeson's "Taken" costar Famke Janssen. But Neeson, she added, "automatically gives a lot more weight to his character."

Neeson read the script several years ago when he met Besson at a film festival, and recalled telling the filmmaker at the time: "I'd love to do this film. On one condition: I want to do all the fighting."

"That's the only way I'd want you to do it," he remembers Besson answering.