Above all else, “Taken” painfully hammers home the fact that nothing can make up for a bad script.  Especially when the script is not just bad, but painfully bad.  Astronomically bad.

Attempting to enumerate all the ways in which Taken fails would be an exercise in futility.  The movie is one giant plot hole, constructed with coincidences and contrivances galore.  The dialogue is cringe-inducing, and the performances (except, inexplicably, Neeson’s) are laughable.  At this point you’re thinking, sure, but the action’s great right?

Sort of.

This movie is a Bourne Identity rip-off, which in and of itself is not such a bad thing.  The action sequences are gritty and grounded in reality.  In a better film, the action might be fantastic.  The problem is that the movie is so outrageously bad that even the hand-to-hand combat and gunplay can’t salvage it.  Like when Neeson starts randomly killing, your first thought is to wonder why he’s brutalizing practically everyone he sees, some who are only tenuously connected to the villains.  But even if you can overlook the glaring and weird amorality, you wonder how you can take seriously the guy who just spent fifteen-minutes worth of exposition telling you that he’s perused the manual to a cheap karaoke machine over 200 times so he can buy it and win back the affections of his 17-year-old daughter (who looks 26 but comes off an absolutely grating 12).

The dialogue and story are so bad that they rob the action of any power, producing instead only snickers.  The baffling thing–in a fascinating car wreck sort of way–is that the film doesn’t rush to the action so as to lead with its stronger foot.  We have to wait about 40 minutes before things heat up.  Until then, weird and ineffective character moments lead the way, all underscored almost without exception by, you guessed it, slow piano music.

This was not a good movie.