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Fired Up shouldn't be worth a damn, and, for the most part, it isn't. The film, after all, details the adventures of two smug, smartass high school jocks sneaking into a cheerleading camp in order to bed as many cheerleaders as they can. The leads, played by Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D'Agosto, aren't characters so much as walking punchlines machines, and are really only distinguished by the fact that Olsen, who mugs a lot, is quite a bit more unsufferable than D'Agosto, who has a Beatles haircut and spends a lot of time looking soulful. As is the way of these movies, not only are the actors in them far too old to be high school students, but they act it. The movie wastes two terrific character actors, Philip Baker Hall and Edie McClurg; the latter, a longtime veteran of Hollywood's comedy community, could offer a graduate seminar in how to be funny. The script, by someone named Freedom Jones, feels as though it was assembled from an Ikea flat pack containing a hex key, a few pieces of hardboard and a sheet of instructions, written in Swedish, explaining how to make a teen comedy.

Given this, the film is better and funnier than it has any right to be. It helps that while the film's two main characters might be defined by their unsavory desire for teen pulchritude, the filmmakers themselves aren't. The film could simply have been an excuse to strip as many aspiring starlets of their garments as possible, but it isn't. Our heroes' conquests are mostly hinted at, but rarely shown, and the one sequence in which everybody bares it all is during a skinny dipping scene, in which most of the women demurely keep themselves underwater. In fact, it turns out the whole sequence is just an excuse to get Olsen and D'Agosto naked in order to humiliate them.

Additionally, the film may waste two of its older talents, but makes excellent use of John Michael Higgens. In the past few years, Hollywood has discovered that Higgens, who looks like a mild-mannered father from a 1950s television show, can be put into almost any movie and make it funnier, and so the makers of Fired Up give the actor as much time in this movie as they can justify, and then just get out of his way. Higgens plays the cheerleading camp's coach, and he brings to it a sort of lunatic manufactured enthusiasm, as though he had been a male cheerleader for so long that he no longer knows what should be cheered and what shouldn't. He prances around like a show pony, barking orders like a drill instructor and flying into girlish tantrums when minor rules are broken. He's so funny that the filmmakers get to the point where they seem to be straining to get him into as many scenes as possible, and sometimes they just put him in the background, watching cheerleaders rehearse their routines and mimicking them in the way that someone who has seen a movie many times will sometimes blurt out the dialogue. (The movie includes a scene of this, by the way: It shows the entire camp spread out on the ground, watching an outdoor move, and the movie is Bring It On, a 2000 film that Fired Up is mildly inspired by; as the movie plays, the entire cast recites every single line of the film in unison.)

Director Will Gluck, who is mostly a veteran of television comedies, brings a nicely daffy quality to the film. For one thing, he is obsessed with the physicality of cheerleading, and not in the way that, say, Debbie Does Dallas was. No, Gluck is curious about the way cheerleaders move, and so he has sort of constructed a world in which cheerleaders will behave like cheerleaders all the time. They do everything in unconscious unison, and, when not doing anything else, throw one leg over a friend's shoulder and start stretching. One group marches in military lockstep, and collectively make a panther-like growl, with accompanying clawing hand-gesture, when exiting the scene. Olsen and D'Agosto mimic this when they become male cheerleaders, but go too far with it: In several scenes, they just take off down the streets, tumbling like gymnasts, as though that's just how they get from place to place. Similarly, school mascots are always school mascots in this film: They never take off their costumes and never speak, even when lounging around in front of the television. This gives the film a weird visual panache. Even scenes that aren't very funny end up feeling somewhat hysterical.

As by-the-books as the plotting might be, screenwriter Freedom Jones hints that he's cleverer than you might guess. For one thing, he obviously recognized that he had created a story that might be insufferable. We might have very little sympathy for the to leads incessant womanizing, and so he does two things. First of all, he makes it clear that every girl at cheerleading camp knows why the boys are there, and don't mind, and are taking advantage of it too. (The film even includes a lesbian cheerleader who is obviously at camp for the same reason, and seems to be doing about as well.) Secondly, Freedom Jones makes one of the boys, D'Agosto, fall in love with a cheerleader, and spends most of the story following their halting romance. It isn't a great romance, but it does give the opportunity to introduce a character, played by David Walton, who is so obnoxious that he makes the film's protagonists seem positively gentlemanly. His character's name is Rick, but he insists everybody call him "Doctor" Rick, as he is a college freshman studying medicine, and "why put off the inevitable?" He is dating the cheerleader that D'Agosto has fallen for, and has been cheating on her, and is the ne plus ultra of douchebag boyfriends, down to the fact that he wears, and frequently polishes, a lime-green pair of Crocs. Next to him, the film's two male leads are suddenly recast as relatively harmless. Actually, as the film goes on, they become rather obsessed with cheerleading, having earnest discussions about moving from their core and whether they are favoring one side of their body too much, a transformation that culminates at a houseparty with their fellow football players. While the other jocks stagger around drunkenly and smash things, Olsen and D'Agosto quietly make Greek salad in the kitchen and discuss their feelings. Suddenly, they realize that this is not the sort of thing jocks do, and they're not jocks anymore; they've accidentally turned into cheerleaders. And here's a moment when it starts seeming like Freedom Jones might be a smarter writer than this film lets on. Because much earlier in the film, as a throwaway joke, D'Agosto had listed the ingredients of Greek salad. For those paying attention, the scene hints that they always were cheerleaders, and just didn't know it.

Taken is a movie about a government spook whose daughter is kidnapped abroad, so he tracks her down and kills everybody connected to her kidnapping. I'm not giving away anything by telling you that -- the plot is spelled out by the advertising campaign, which features the spook talking to his daughter's kidnappers and informing them, in a quiet and measured voice, that they will soon all be dead. Frankly, if the spook didn't do what he promised, there wouldn't be much of a movie. So there are no surprises in the film's plotting. For some critics, the surprise is in the casting. The spook, you see, is played by Liam Neeson, who pretty much everybody agrees is a very good actor, and sometimes even a very great one.

So there has been some consternation in critical circles that Neeson would degrade himself by appearing in trash like this, which I find puzzling. Haven't these critics followed Neeson's career? While you can't precisely fault the man for appearing in Batman Begins or Kingdom of Heaven or Krull, they're not high art, and he makes a lot of trashy actioners such as these. In fact, were it not for the fact that he occasionally appears in a movie like Kinsey or Les Miserables, which play to art houses, he would mostly be known as a big and grim-faced actor who can always be counted on to add a touch of depth and class to otherwise unremarkable genre films that feature a lot of action. Taken is not an aberration in Neeson's career, it's typical of his career. 

I guess people consider it a shame. After all, Neeson exudes gravitas. With his rugged features and rattling baritone, not to mention his huge frame and rough, masculine features, he seems like an actor who was made for great films. In the 1940s, there would have been an endless supply of well-crafted period pieces that require an actor of Neeson's caliber and physicality, but now they are relatively rare, and, as with Gangs of New York, they tend not to center around towering heroic figures, but young punks, and so Neeson tends to play an older mentor to a much less interesting younger lead, and often dies off relatively early, and the films are always poorer as a result.

So if Neeson doesn't want to spend his entire career teaching Orlando Bloom how to heft a broadsword or Christian Bale how to be Batman or Hayden Christensen how to be Darth Vader, he has to take roles in films like Taken every so often. As action films go, it's neither bad nor good, but has a few elements that are great fun and a few elements that are somewhat troubling. The film is loosely like Get Carter or Point Blank, two Seventies crime films about single-minded killers going about their task with ruthless efficiency, and Neeson's character is about as ruthless and efficient as anybody ever put on film. He is frequently ingenious about it -- in one scene, he bothers a prostitute on a Paris street until her Albanian pimp comes out to slap some sense into him. But this has all been a pretext for putting a microphone on the man, and Neeson quickly hurries back to his car, where he has a bewildered Albanian translator waiting. It doesn't take Neeson long to track down his daughter, and he is not nice to the men who took her, and that's what the film promised.

But the film starts off by making the villains Albanian immigrants to Paris who are involved in white slavery, and, later, we discover the whole thing is orchestrated by a porcine sheik with an army of kohl-eyed Arab assassins. Neeson is not above torturing a suspect to get what he wants, and so we end up with some queasy scenes in which an American soldier, trained as a spook, electrocutes or otherwise abuses a Muslim in order to get some information. (Never mind that Neeson is actually Irish; the film makes no mention of the fact, and you are just supposed to ignore it, despite his languid Northern Irish accent.) These scenes would seem like an apologia for American torture in the Gulf Coast, but for the fact that the film's writer and director, Luc Besson and Pierre Morel, are French. Presumably they are merely using Albanians the way American filmmakers use American minorities -- as a violent criminal underclass that can always be dispatched without fuss or concern. Nonetheless, the image of Liam Neeson as an American spy strapping high voltage lines to an Muslim prisoner is a distinctly queasy one.

It also points to a fault in the screenwriting. With both Get Carter and Point Blank, the main characters were irredeemable killers -- they are a product of the criminal world, and, when wronged, take their revenge. Neeson's character is not that. He is a former soldier who yearns to be a good father, and the film takes a lot of time establishing his concern and care for his daughter. So much time, in fact, that you never learn much about his past in the military, except that he is handy with hand-to-hand combat and considers his profession honorable. I think the filmmakers wanted to tell the story of a man with a violent past who has set it aside, but, when his daughter is kidnapped, gives in to his murderous impulses. Unfortunately, they forgot to tell that story. Instead, we end up with two Neeson's -- the good father and the clever, if brutal, killer. There is no transition from one to the other, and no sense that they might be the same man. So we end up with quite a lot of Neeson chasing down Muslims in Paris streets, and quite a lot of Neeson turning Arabs into bloody sides of beef, but very little of Neeson's journey as a character. And, without that, you don't need an actor, you just need a thug.

The critics were right about one thing. This film is beneath Liam Neeson.