Liam Neeson's problem has always been that he's way too tall to be as good an actor as he is.

Take a look at any number of scenes from the fast, tight, brutal new action thriller "Taken."

He stands there stoop-shouldered, when his head doesn't actually drop below his shoulders

altogether. He looks like a man who has spent his entire life being the tallest guy in the

room and hasn't always been happy about it.

The truth is that the combo hasn't been good for his career. At least half the time, he's a

bit of a solemn and massive bore onscreen.

"Taken"

3 stars

Starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Leland Orser, Jon Gries and Famke Janssen. Directed by Pierre Morel. 91 minutes. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, disturbing thematic material, sexual content, some drug references and language. Opened Friday in area theaters.

"Taken" is one of those movies from the other half. He was made for it.

He plays a retired American agent who has a decidedly murky answer when his 17-year-old

daughter (Maggie Grace) asks, as all agents' kids must eventually do, just what DID you do for

the government, Daddy?

"I was a preventer," he answers. "I prevented bad things from happening."

The movie, you should know, was produced and co-written by Luc Besson, the French action

maestro whose stock-in-trade is the superman (or superwoman) thug who has got a decidedly

generic nickname: the transporter, the professional, La Femme Nikita.

Well, then. What happens when Daddy, the loving "preventer," couldn't do anything in

California to prevent his adored teen daughter from being kidnapped in Paris by an Albanian

sex slave ring?

Bad things. That's what.

Very bad things.

And not all of them happen to bad guys, either. At one point, a perfectly innocent and

doting mother is suddenly shot in the arm.

It's very simple, he says on the phone after actually hearing his daughter kidnapped a

continent away. He warns the bad guy on his cell phone that he's got "a very particular set of

skills" that will make the kidnapper's life precarious at best. "I will look for you, I will

find you and I will kill you," he says, outlining the near future as succinctly as possible.

You spend the first 20 minutes of "Taken" thinking he's a tiny bit of a wuss, actually. His

beautiful ex-wife (Famke Janssen) ... now married to a superrich shlub (Xander Berkley) ... calls

him "pathetic." He's kind of a nervous nellie about his 17-year-old going unescorted to Paris

with her 18-year-old gal pal. His ex-wife, on the other hand, is a total idiot about it,

secretly giving her daughter permission to follow U2 around the continent on their European

tour.

For the rest of the movie, we find out that Daddy is, in fact, the least wussy American who

has ever set foot in Paris. He's a stone killer.

Neeson may be Irish, but he plays here a typical American Who Shouldn't Be Messed With ...

Clint Eastwood plus 40 pounds. The movie, in fact, is a kind of re-setting of Eastwood in Don

Siegel's old classic "Coogan's Bluff" ... you remember that one about the Western lawman "with

skills" on the loose in Manhattan after a megathug named Ringerman.

Well, here's our retired "preventer" on the loose breaking bones and piling up bodies in

Paris, where all the Parisians seem to be corrupt slime, the Albanians are even worse, and

let's not even talk about the Middle Eastern sheiks.

Not only is Besson ... producer and co-writer ... French, but so is his director, Pierre Morel.

I don't think these guys will be getting a medal from the French government anytime soon for

their ennoblement of French image abroad.

The movie, like Thomas Hobbes' immortal description of our common human lot, is nasty,

brutish and short.

And, if you ask me, pretty bloody good.

Neeson's record as a great screen actor is, to put it charitably, spotty. (There's

"Schindler's List" and not a whole lot else.)

But if ever there were a fellow so big that mayhem really does look easy for him, it's Liam

Neeson.

He does indeed have "skills" in "Taken."

But then, so does the movie.