One of the biggest and most surprising box-office hits of the year so far, the Liam Neeson thriller "Taken" gooses a tired genre premise and turns it into a tense exercise in paternal payback. Why? Mostly because of its Charles Bronson-with-a-brogue accent star.

Neeson plays Brian Mills, an ex-CIA agent who specialized in hand-to-hand combat in nasty corners of the world, scraping his knuckles while doing the government's top-secret dirty work. But when we meet him he's left all of that behind to try to spend more time with his 17-year-old daughter, played by "Lost" star Maggie Grace. He's trying to mend their broken relationship and isn't getting much help in that department because of bitter ex-wife played by Famke Janssen, who's remarried a rich sugar daddy.

When Neeson's daughter begs him for his approval to let her go with a girlfriend to France for the summer, he buckles despite his better judgement. Big mistake. Almost as soon as she and her pal touch down at Charles DeGualle, they're kidnapped, drugged, sold into white slavery. Neeson immediately snaps into action, growling like a lion out to protect his cub. First, he jets to Paris and then he proceeds to waste scores of Albanian goons with his CIA-taught smarts and less cerebral skills. There's a lot of neck-crunching and shoot 'em up confrontations and the DVD comes with both a PG-13 and a crunchier unrated version.

Either way, Neeson's bodycount rivals all three Bourne movies put together. And you can't help but wonder why this guy hasn't made more of these kinds of movies before. He's great at them, both the quick-thinking brutality and the emotional stuff most action stars would try for and fail at. Make no mistake, "Taken" is slick Hollywood action trash. But it's 24-karat action trash.

Now for a look at what else is new on DVD: in "Galaxy Quest", the hilarious sci-fi send-up gets a deluxe edition facelift; in "Personal Effects", Ashton Kutcher and Michelle Pfeiffer play a pair of damaged people who help each other mourn; and in "The Dana Carvey Show", the awesomely bizarre but short-lived TV show gets a boxed set.