Review: ‘Taken 3’

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.

But no one expects smart storytelling from this most unlikely of film franchises. We all come to a “Taken” movie because we want to see old man Liam Neeson kill peoples’ asses and just be the smoothest, smartest guy in the room, and he’s doing that here, just while on the run from people instead of hunting them down. The roles are sort of reversed, save for the fact that he is simultaneously doing his own hunting as well, looking for his wife’s killer and all. And quality wise, this thing sits somewhere between the first two movies. The first movie had the novelty of bad ass Liam and his “particular set of skills,” as well as the lurid appeal of a movie centered around the sex trade, and the second one was almost a parody of the first. This time around, they went in a slightly different direction, really now just making an action movie with Liam in the center. Really, this could have been any movie with a different title, different character names, not like his characters are THAT much different from movie to movie anyway. But now “Taken” has a little cache, and that will make it some money, so that’s why it’s “Taken 3” and not something else entirely.

The biggest problem with this movie, just like the other two, is that is uses the same post-modern action approach to shooting and editing, so whenever the action kicked in, which was pretty often, it was all close ups with shaking cameras accentuated by quick edits, rapidly cutting from blurry image to blurry image. Reportedly Liam Neeson did his own fight sequences throughout the film, but it doesn’t even matter because you barely get a sense of what happens in most of the scenes anyway. When a car flips during an overly destructive car chase, there are at least four different edits, showing it from every angle possible, instead of just giving us one nice clean shot that would let us actually see what happens.

Also it is worth noting that this movie does the old action movie trope of having a car just EXPLODING after it rolls down a cliffside and ends up all smashed. It went up in a huge fireball like it was packed with drums of gasoline, and people stand around and watch it like “yup, that’s normal.” When will movies ever stop with this ridiculous crap. It belongs in a “Last Action Hero” sequel, not here. Get over it, guys.

And also this movie has that awful PG-13 violence in which scores of people are machine gunned down and there is nary a drop of blood in sight. A movie that revels in so much violence and then neglects to show the real consequences of the violence are kind of irresponsible, and that applies to this movie. A slashed throat has never looked so…not slashed.

But hey, it’s a “Taken” movie. The THIRD one, for crissakes. It is just popcorn entertainment, not meant to be heavily scrutinized, just sit back and watch this old man be awesome. And he’s reliably awesome. The movie around him is serviceable. That’s about it. And hopefully this really will be the end of a mildly entertaining film series.