Taken

 I remember this film being much more exciting, but to be fair, the first time I saw it, I actually watched, rather than glanced over every once in a while between rounds of spider solitaire.

Did this movie remind anyone of the first season of 24? That is to say, I'm sure it did, but did it you?

While glancing through other critics' comments, I noticed one who seemed to notice the same thing I did. Thematically, this story is about a man who will go to any lengths to rescue his mortally imperiled daughter. With time as a serious factor, he escalates his violence to an extreme.

Although there is no possible way we might sympathize with the antagonists (they're selling girls into sexual slavery), I still found the level of violence somewhat disproportionate. A contemporary audience needs that level of violence, yes? If we remove that as a factor, though, and assume that internally, that level of violence is the only way to save the helpless teen, can we still look the character in the eyes and feel relief?

Think of Serenity, Joss Whedon's movie conclusion to the television show Firefly. During the final confrontation, the supremely violent and unstoppable antagonist admits that when he has finished his deadly and distasteful job, the empire he will have created will no longer have a place for him.
That displacement, that unease, concluded this movie as well.

When his daughter was safe, when everything was cleaned up and this determined father (miraculously, or magically) escapes justice in Paris, he returns to America, and I find that the blissful conclusion doesn't seem to allow him in, despite how affectionate his daughter's step-father seems to the man who has just saved his step-daughter. The character now carries around this aura of extremism that doesn't quite fit civilization.

What SHOULD he have done, though? Could one iota less violence possibly have saved his child?

Well, yes. There were several moments when the character stepped beyond that which was truly necessary. After he had tortured men to get information, killed the ignorant and injured the innocent, he continued.
Perhaps I should argue that leaving live men behind is an invitation for future trouble, but could I not then argue that he wasted valuable time killing people when he could have been moving toward his daughter? (not much time, admittedly. It doesn't take but a few seconds to fill a bastard full of bullets). Still, though, if rescuing his daughter had been his true aim, and not bloody revenge, things might have looked just slightly different.

It is that innate pleasure in killing that makes the character unfit for the society he is saving, and that makes the ending of the movie just that little bit less satisfying.