A film that's taken a lot from "Taken"

Rating: Null/10 (6 May 2015)

A former secret agent with a special set of skills who has tried to leave all this behind him but is pulled back into the field when a young woman is badly treated by foreign thugs. Sound familiar? This is very much the ground trodden by the "Taken" franchise, although the title of this film and the name of its lead character are borrowed from a television series of the late 1980s.
On the small screen, Edward Woodward played a British former spy; in this big screen version, the role is filled by the charismatic Denzel Washingtion as ex-CIA. It starts slow and remains pedestrian for half-an-hour so. Then the action starts and rackets up and up to a major shoot-out in the hardware depot where Robert McCall was previously a nondescript worker and now find original use for some of the tools on sale.