Former agent Bill is now doing security for his daughter Kim’s favourite pop singer. It earns him a favour that will neatly close the story, and in this short time takes Taken into dangerous territory, delivering the first in a series of thinly-disguised telegraphs that bedevil the film’s tension. “I need you to focus,” Bill urges. But really, there’s no need.

When Kim takes an ill-advised holiday to France, she’s snatched into prostitution. Armed with the fury of a father scorned, the subtlety of a builder’s trowel, a bewildered look and truly unmanageable dialogue, Bill sets out to find her. As righteousness turns to rage, he claims a staggering body count while taking down the Albanian slave trade and a few rogue Arabs with him. “We used to outsource torture,” he says, “but it was unreliable”. Rather like the film.

Bill’s violent transition from loving father to killing machine and back is poorly handled at best. Taken is simply an exercise in audience-chilling violence strapped to a hokey yarn of familial love. It fails on both counts.

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