I liked the sound of this so much it was a must-see. A government spy Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) in retirement, recently divorced, wants to close the gap between his daughter Kim’s growing up and his being away at the job. She goes on holiday with a friend to Paris where she finds herself kidnapped and the father’s back in action.

Two teenagers on the loose in Paris have the temptations of sex, at least for Kim’s friend, while Kim is more skeptical when they meet a stranger who has invited them to a party. Kim’s common sense is better thinking when the stranger turns out to be the pawn of con-men.

Mum Lenore (Famkee Janssen, who played Jean Grey from the X-Men franchise) wants her to be independent while Dad is more cautious since he’s been in the business of “preventing bad things happening”, he tells Kim on the way to the airport, one of the few moments she has opportunity to let sink through what her Dad does.

The first half hour builds-up to the kidnapping incident and moves reasonably swiftly along, with a few lulls, with Mills’ quick thinking coupled with his calmly confident attitude. He’s an established spy.

Liam Neeson has kick-butt action down pat although that makes the credibility of the plot especially towards the end appear dubious when this unstoppable hero is almost invincible.

He oozes presence, though, as usual, and has martial arts squared up effortlessly. This could surprise anyone familiar with him in quieter presence-roles such as in Schindler’s List and The Phantom Menace (he gets to utter the word “focus” again in Taken in terms of talking down his innocent in trouble over the phone, rather than little Anakin).

Mills is better than Jason Bourne simply because Mills has a different motive and focus than Bourne. Both are concentrated, though; it’s in the voice, it’s in the action, it’s in the eyes and face. Mills wants to save his daughter, which is outward, whereas Bourne wants to save his own life, something more selfishly interior. Bourne has to do it, that’s the rub, but there’s something more admirable about a man righting the wrong.

However, Neeson as Mills is empathic for another reason when from the start of the movie he’s trying to connect with his daughter by buying her a birthday present.

He’s trying to show he loves her and it is not until the final shot that it provides that emotion in the audience when we realize what Mills has to do to prove it.

The journey is not only a quest for his daughter’s salvation. It’s also one that is cathartic for his relationship with her and her with his.

Lenore is emotionally distant at the birthday party while she’s with Stuart, the new husband, who gives Kim (Maggie Grace) a better present seemingly.

But it’s Mills who has the skills and guts to operate in the shady world he’s about to encounter in Paris, and he’s a nice guy too. Liam Neeson gets the contrast effectively so we’re still rooting for him when he’s a nice guy and a professional retributing.

“This is no time for measuring dicks”, he tells Stuart, whose talk doesn’t prove anything at his ex-wife’s place when on the kidnapper’s tail.

The issue of the kidnapping is exacerbated by the tension of why. Without revealing that, doing so would spoil the plot, there’s enough to say that it’s an emotionally gripping one which cathartically purges the blood guilt out of the system when you are gripped by Mills, ex-machina, unstoppable in his attempt to free his daughter.

The tone of moral retribution has social and personal dimensions.

Mills is a kind-of-picture of the frustrations of men in relation to others in the system complying with corruption. Mills is the everyman venting symbolically the restoration of what’s wrong and what needs to be done to flush it out. He is the powerful side of the powerless individual in the face of the networks, some of them undesirable, which evade everyone, everyday, in the process of flow, globalization and its counterpart immigration (read: Albanian). Mills goes to the undesirable without flinching.

Since movies are symbols representing all of us as humans in varied ways then Mills is the conscience and stares a straight course in life and the perpetrators of disease and sin represent the flip side of everyman’s weakness, a sobering moral corrective.

You could gripe over how the plot mechanizes rather than weaves. It doesn’t totally deliver a knock-out thriller. Its medium budget stages stunts with a feather-weight rather than something stronger. It’s not too graphic with its martial arts and minimal car chases but the subject is loaded.

That’s irrelevant, though, to what was bound to be a good story when reading the synopsis. It’s engaging for the most, Liam Neeson’s focal performance is true and involving and the true-to-life realities do require some re-thinking and doing over. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s good of its kind, but it’s good in its own right.

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