Liam Neeson and Maggie Grace star in in Taken 3.Daniel McFadden
Screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, I don't know where you are, but I will find you, and I will kill you.
In the cool, certain, butch manner of Liam Neeson's deeply focused and lethal action-hero Bryan Mills, that's my phone message to the script-cobbling duo behind the money-raking film franchise Taken, a bombastic series heretofore pleasing, but which now ends in unacceptably limp form. How bad is Taken 3? Nobody in the film is abducted – you know, taken. Besson and Kamen, you had one job to do!
While the first two editions of Taken took place in European locales and involved the kidnapping of our attack machine's daughter and former wife, Taken 3 is set in Los Angeles, where the former CIA operative is familiar with the city's escape hatches and secret bunkers, which come in handy because this time it is he who is on the run.
He's a fugitive, wanted for murder.
Did he commit the crime? Of course not – this noble, dulcet-toned bone-crusher kills, but he's not a killer. Or as the current husband of his beloved former wife puts it, "He's not dangerous. He lives in a dangerous world."
It is fine that we know Mills was framed. What isn't fine is that we know that his pursuer (a whip-smart police inspector, played by Forest Whitaker) knows that he's innocent. So, Mills runs around Los Angeles, using his impressive skill set to find whoever it is responsible for the crime of which he is accused, and even though Whitaker's bagel-eating lawman gives competent chase, there's no tension to be had.
There's not a lot of anything to be had, really. Where there was a desperation to Harrison Ford's fox-hunted protagonist in 1993's The Fugitive, Neeson's unemotional mien makes for a humdrum tenor – no knuckle-whiting at all.
Russian mobsters, who in real life are some of the best thugs in the world, are fairly incapable in Taken 3. Mills, with help from his crew of fellow former CIA dudes, smacks down the tattooed Cossacks pretty easily for a less than buff middle-aged white guy.
There's a smash-dash car chase, but the stunting is perfunctory; Bullitt sleeps soundly tonight.
The soundtrack is obtrusive and marked by inappropriate musical choices. And there's one fade-out scene involving L.A.'s concrete storm-drain canal. Well done, Olivier Megaton (who also directed 2012's Taken 2). Nobody's ever thought of using that urban waterway in a film before.
Beautiful Famke Janssen is back as ex-wife Lenore. She's still in love with Mills, and the feelings are mutual. But our man is nothing if not honourable, and so while there is a hint of hanky, there is nothing close to panky going on.
Also returning is Maggie Grace as daughter Kim. She's in college now, distracted by home pregnancy kits. She spends most of the film throwing shade at her unctuous stepfather (Dougray Scott).
The plot is complicated and unlikely, which, given the guilty-pleasure appeal of the Taken series, isn't necessarily a problem. It's a concern here though, because the dubious narrative serves as a framework for uninspired actioner fare only.
Killer lines from Neeson? If you were at the screening I attended, those two legitimate laugh-out-louds you heard were from me. When Whitaker's lawman character tells Mills that it's up for the court to decide his guilt or innocence, and that "my job is to bring you in," Mills comes back with, "Good luck with that," with an even, dismissive tone that is just so pitch perfect.
And when a police officer warns Mills that "this is going to end badly for you," our fellow's footloose reply is, "Don't be such a pessimist."
Chortle. But who gets the last laugh? For Neeson and the Taken series, it does indeed end badly. Taken 3 is one of those necessary unnecessary happenings, like the second Hearns-Leonard fight or the recent Black Sabbath reunion. It's an obligatory, hollow follow-through – one that will leave fans of the franchise feeling used, or, one might say, taken.
Brad Wheeler