Cast: Liam Nesson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen. You know the drill. Nesson has a special set of skills that make him invincible. Grace comes a little closer to being assigned an age (college-ish for the 31 year old actress). As any preview tells you, Janssen is dead and she plays it convincingly. Throw in Forrest Whitaker for some clout and way too many similar looking white guys with accents and you have a Taken movie.
Plot: Like the previous two movies, there's a kind of painful first act of character development follow by about 90 minutes of Nesson being ridiculously good at fighting, escaping, investigating, parkour, hacking, and all around not dying. Now, mind you, none of this is a bad thing. It worked well for the original Taken. It worked for The Equalizer. I can very much enjoy a movie like this, but I won't pretend that there's more to them than there is. Where the first two movies stick to the concept of someone being taken, this shifts into a straight-up manhunt. I could call it a clever inversion of the concept, but no one would believe the sincerity of that claim. It's got just enough shaky cam action to keep you interested most of the way through.
Elephant in the Room: Is it really even Taken anymore? If Taken is to be a franchise (which it shouldn't) then there needs to be a reason. Taken 2 assumed that the reason was the "taken" idea and found another loved one for Nesson to save from thugs. It had plenty of issues, but I understood why it existed as a sequel to the first movie. Taken 3 smartly moves away from the initial concept (because really, what are the odds that happens a third time to him?). Not, so smartly, they move the story from exotic European locations to Los Angeles. Basically, that means the "franchise" is Nesson's character, who I couldn't even tell you the name of without IMDB (Bryan Mills). The problem there is that he's not much of a character (more of an action delivery system). The end result is a movie that could be a stand alone, perhaps to greater effect.
To Sum Things Up:
Even if I forgive the fact that Taken 3 really shouldn't be a sequel, because it's a different thing entirely, I can't find much great to say about it. It's the story of a man who is framed for murder and responds by becoming a homeland-terrorist. Half the time it's cops, not nameless thugs he's fighting and the meticulous precision of Nesson in the original is replaced with haphazard risk-taking. The plot works only in the most basic ways, like most Luc Besson scripts these days. Perhaps I'm remembering the first movie too fondly in my comparison to this, but that only hurts Taken if that's the case. There's no pretending that this is a well done movie. It doesn't anger me the way something like Non-Stop did because it doesn't think that it's being clever. The movie knows what it is. It's just too messy and there's no goodwill left for me to pretend I enjoyed it more than I did (which was only a little).
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
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