'Taken'

To his divorced wife and estranged 17-year-old daughter, Bryan Mills is Mr. Worry Wart. Propose an idyllic summer vacation in Paris for the little miss and all he can do is whine about the risk and worry that "you have no idea what the world is like." Telling him not to fret, he says, is "like telling water not to be wet." It turns out, however, that Bryan Mills has his reasons.

For, in a plot that threatens to put a serious dent in the French tourism industry, no sooner does that daughter set foot in the City of Light than she gets kidnapped by the most ruthless gang of Albanian white slavers the world has seen. And would you believe the only person who has the skills and the moxie to have even a chance of bringing her back alive is her disregarded dad?

This at least is the premise of "Taken," a brisk and violent action programmer that can't help being unintentionally silly at times. It's the English-language product of French director Pierre Morel ("District B13") and French producer-screenwriter Luc Besson and his American co-writer Robert Mark Kamen, and it benefits as much as it can from having Irish actor Liam Neeson in the starring role.

Neeson's Mills is a former CIA agent whose job was so deep into black ops that the closest he can come to describing it is saying he was "a preventer," someone who "prevented bad things from happening." Not as good as being "the decider," but close.

Mills is retired now, spending lonely nights consuming takeout Chinese food, because he wants to make up for years of career-enforced separation by getting closer to daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who now lives with mother Lenore (Famke Janssen) and Lenore's wealthy new husband, a typically bloated L.A. plutocrat. Think of a clean and sober version of "The Wrestler's" Randy "The Ram" Robinson and you'll get the general idea of what's going on.

But as Mills himself says, "I'm retired, not dead," and when Kim and a friend get abducted by those amoral Albanians, he springs into action, letting the kidnappers know that he has "a very particular set of skills acquired over a very long career in the shadows, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. . . . I will look for you, I will find you. And I will kill you." In that order.

Obviously, "Taken" is not the kind of action film to spend much time worrying about its pedestrian script or largely indifferent acting, so it's fortunate to have Neeson in the starring role.