If you thought that Bond had too much plot and Transporter had too much goofy action, then you will absolutely love Taken. It’s about a bunch of people who kidnap young American girls, give them hard drugs, and sell them as sex slaves. I’m sorry, that was a bit dark. Here, I’ll add in a bunch of slow-motion jumps through glass and explosions to make you feel better.

That’s probably how Taken was pitched to various studio executives. Dark, gritty subject matter dumbed down for the action buffs. If you live in pretty much any country besides America, this is no news to you. Maybe you’ve even seen the R-rated cut with even more violence than the PG-13 cut. The truth is, Taken wants to break the mold of cliche action without making any effort to do so.

Anyway, the plot. Liam Neeson stars as Action Hero #23641, otherwise known as Bryan. He’s a retired Secret Service agent who’s wife divorced him long ago for being such a… workaholic. He retired so that he could spend quality time with his daughter, Kim, even though his ex-wife wants to prevent Kim from ever seeing him at all for the sole reason for being as typical an ex-wife as possible. When Kim travels to Paris with her friend Amanda, they get kidnapped by Albanese people that aim to force them into prostitution. This job seems like a difficult task, but luckily, Kim and Amanda tell a complete stranger the room and hotel they are staying at, and the completely unrelated note that they are alone. And they wonder why they got kidnapped.

So Liam Neeson needs to find his daughter, using sorcery. He somehow finds out who took his daughter, where to find her, and where to find the kidnappers based on a voice he heard on the phone. Because he… was once in the secret service, oh right, that explains it. Sorry. Look, there’s no point in going on, you can pick out the stupidities as easy as I can.

There’s no real villain either, as each and every evil character is granted about five minutes of screen time before being stabbed or shot in the face, by Liam Neeson of course. There’s a small villain, a little one, but he’s so lame and boring that he comes off as a minor annoyance rather than an evil sociopath. So what we have here is a major problem with the script, as if someone cut out half of the material that gets in the way of the explosions. The acting is fine, Liam Neeson kicks ass. But that doesn’t distract you from the disturbingly awful dialogue that made me dive under the theater seat for safety. Sure, there is some advancing of the plot here and there, but those scenes exists solely as opportunity for a bathroom break, so as to not risk missing another explosion or two.

So there you have it, a film devoid of humor, plot, and sense. It’s like they got two different production teams on different hemispheres without any communication with each other to make two seperate halves of the movie. I diagnose Taken with bipolar disorder.