Liam Neeson shows off his Jack Bauer impression in "Taken," a violent revenge thriller that suffers bad timing.

"Taken" leaps onto the "torture chic" bandwagon driven mostly by "24" (though "Lost" deserves some of the blame) for the last few years. But "Taken" may have leaped at the wrong moment in history, arriving in theaters a week after President Obama banned torture. Even "24" anticipated the new administration and has hedged its position this season, with new characters constantly chiding Jack that torture is wrong - not that it's stopped him yet.

Films, which take at least two years to go from screenplay to theatrical release, cannot adjust to the public's changing moods as rapidly as television. With its hardcore approach to violence and torture, "Taken" seems so 2007.

To say Neeson's character, retired CIA operative Bryan Mills, often resorts to torture would be inaccurate. "Resort" implies he considers other options first. For Bryan, torture becomes his primary mode of social interaction. He's the kind of guy who always keeps a set of jumper cables handy, and not to start a car. Despite this, "Taken" has received a lenient PG-13 rating.

Unlike Jack Bauer, Bryan doesn't maim enemies on the government's dime. He's acting as a private citizen, trying to find the white slavers who kidnapped his teenage daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace, formerly of "Lost"), while she was vacationing in Paris. When a French official warns Bryan, "You can't just go around tearing down Paris," he responds, "I'll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to."

By the time Neeson delivers this sub-Steven Seagal line, you already will have asked yourself 287 times why such a respected, Oscar-nominated actor would star in this piece of junk. Was he looking for a script with lousier dialogue than "The Phantom Menace"?

Like most contemporary action movies that don't star Matt Damon, "Taken" jumps from scene to scene with no regard for logic. When Bryan tries to nab a kidnapper at Paris' Orly airport, he kills one suspect, injures another and causes a major traffic jam in front of dozens of witnesses. Yet no police officer arrives to arrest him. As mindless as the action is, at least the filmmakers stage a better car chase through a stone quarry than the one in "Quantum of Solace."

Even though "Taken" is only 93 minutes long, the script contains flab. The opening wastes time with a pointless subplot where Bryan saves a pop diva (named Sheerah) from an attacker. Nothing establishes an ex-CIA operative's tough-guy credibility like a scene stolen from "The Bodyguard."

The script may be simple-minded and its tolerance for torture may be immoral, but the most offense aspect of "Taken" is its jingoism. The whole story is based on the fear of anything foreign. At the outset Bryan objects to his teenage daughter visiting Paris, even though, statistically speaking, she should be safer there than in her hometown of Los Angeles. But Bryan's suspicions of anything not American are proved correct when Kim becomes a target of white slavers minutes after she lands at Orly.

"Taken" is racist as well. Once in Paris, Bryan threatens, tortures and murders a series of dark-skinned men until, finally, he must race the clock to save his daughter before she is deflowered by a glutinous Arab sheik. The screenwriters throw a token rich American into the villainous mix, but essentially "Taken" is about saving American maidenhood from the lascivious foreign hoard - a paranoid theme that filled dime novels a century ago. The only thing missing is the phrase "yellow peril," but maybe they're holding that for the sequel.

Even though the film depicts Paris as a home to all miscreants opposed to American virtues, "Taken" essentially is a French import. Producer and co-writer Luc Besson ("La Femme Nikita," "The Professional") and director Pierre Morel either hold their country's law enforcement in low regard, or - more likely - they cynically expect American audiences to lap up this toxic mix of torture and jingoism. Why would they do this to us after we gave them "Ratatouille"?