Spoiler Alert!

Taken, starring Liam Neeson, was so ridiculous that I exited the theater afterward by walking through one of the giant, gaping holes left by what passed for a plot in this movie.

Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a former government spy who has retired in order to rekindle a relationship with his daughter, Kimmy. She is a 17 year old played by 25 year old Maggie Grace, who must have been told to act approximately 13. She wears sparkly, rainbow-covered clothing, gasps and jumps and giggles a lot when she gets good news, and generally seems to have held onto that pre-teen naiveté that the filmmakers must have hoped would make her actions semi-plausible.

Mills reluctantly allows Kimmy to spend the summer in Paris with her friend Amanda. Kimmy’s mother sees nothing wrong with her daughter going to Europe alone, and has even booked tickets for her daughter to follow U2’s concert tour so she can “experience life.” As a groupie, perhaps?

The two girls arrive in Paris and are immediately charmed by Peter, a local who shares their cab and invites them to a “college party.” Kimmy has doubts, but Amanda not only agrees to meet him later, but gives him their address, and then tells Kimmy that she’ll definitely be sleeping with him. For her stupidity in leading the innocent astray, she clearly must die.

And she does, but not until after she and Kimmy are stolen by Peter’s Albanian bosses. They sell tourists as sex slaves because importing Eastern European girls has become prohibitively expensive. (Damned economy!)

Mills quickly mounts a mission to rescue his daughter. With a little help from his former spy friends, he figures out who has her, and then spends the rest of the movie killing people until he and Kimmy are reunited.

I don’t have a problem with ass-kicking, older men, which has become a trend over the last few years. Hollywood has resurrected yesterday’s action heroes in order to milk their franchises for one more movie. Ford revived Indiana Jones, Willis lived to die harder, and Stallone limped onto the screen with a contemplative Rocky. In this movie, Neeson really sells his identity as a well-trained mo-fo you don’t want to mess with.

However, it’s all the non-ass kicking plot points that tripped me up.

Mills goes to the apartment where the kidnapping occurred. Even though he gets into the building, he has to enter the apartment by slinking across the outside ledge and breaking a window. So he’s a former über-spy who keeps phone tap equipment on hand, but he doesn’t know how to pick a lock?

He susses out the site of the Albanians’ working girls and sees Kimmy’s jacket, then rescues/kidnaps the girl who has it so he can question her. They go to a motel, where Mills sobers her up with the IV bag of anti-narcotics medication he apparently travels with, so she can tell him about the house in “Paradise” where she met his daughter. All she can remember about it is the red door.

Thank goodness it’s the only building with a red door on Rue de Paradis.

He finds newly stolen girls chained to beds and loaded with drugs (including the once-perky Amanda, now dead), and tortures a man to find out where Kimmy has gone.

After some lengthy machinations which involve Mills killing everyone he talks to or looks at (with no interference by the inept French police), he makes it to the sale. Kimmy is paraded out in some kind of diamond bikini as the final, but best item, because she is “pure.” She is then bought by a sheik, who has her dressed in filmy, bridal white lingerie and brought to his yacht’s stateroom – just before Mills busts in to save her from being defiled.

Ultimately, the movie wants to have it both ways. Kimmy is old enough to fill out that diamond bikini and 4-inch stilettos. However, she has to act young enough that the audience buys her innocence, without being disturbed that the character was written and acted as a 13 year-old girl.

Taken doesn’t pull it off.