Well here we go again. Sort of. “Taken 3” is here, long after the jokes about “Taken 2” and its inevitable sequels have disappeared into the wind. How many different ways can our hero and his family members get taken? How will it happen a third time? Who got took this time? And is there even a reason to care about it this time around?
Actually, that’s the funny thing. “Taken 3” doesn’t actually feature anyone really being taken. Sure, at some point, a character gets snatched into a van, but that’s not the focus of this movie. Unlike its predecessors, our hero has a totally different problem to deal with this time around. Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) still loves his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Jannsen) and someone has her killed and placed in his bed, making it look like he murdered her, which then sets him on the run. “Taken 3” is essentially “The Fugitive,” as Mills is out trying to find out who killed his wife and why, all the while evading capture from the police.
Leading the police is Inspector Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), and he’s supposed to be some sort of savant detective. He notices things the “normal” police officers don’t, and he’s constantly playing with a little knight chess piece, as if it had some sort of unspoken symbolism about something. Or maybe he’s just OCD, because if he’s not playing with the chess pieces, he’s constantly wrapping and unwrapping a rubber band around his hand, all the while supposedly being a genius detective. But the fact is, he figures out a couple of things early on without trying too hard, and then spends the rest of the movie not being so brilliant. And then at the end of the movie he reveals that he figured out a key piece of information at the very beginning, but we’ve seen movies before and we already know what he’s talking about so it’s not much of a big reveal.Continue Reading …