Taken 3

Year: 2015
Director: Olivier Megaton

You wouldn’t say the original Taken was great, but it had its moments, most of them in the first thirty minutes. Liam Neeson simultaneously essaying twitchy, nervous parent and special forces badass was cool, and his ‘particular set of skills’ speech can still tingle the spine.

However, the film went downhill from there. For all his talk, Neeson’s skills weren’t especially particular. If you were looking for spycraft you’d come to the wrong place. He was all brawn and no Bourne. Things continued in the same direction for Taken 2 (more of the same, only with shit action scenes) and they pretty much reach rock bottom in number three.

The one thing to recommend Taken 3 is that it doesn’t simply rehash a kidnapped-family-member plotline. No, one of them is dead this time, and murder-suspect Neeson is trying to escape capture (by dogged cop Forest Whitaker, the only good thing in this mess) while simultaneously investigating/avenging the death. As stories go, it’s not exactly original and it only nods at what was appealing about the original jittery-parent-badass concept, but that needn’t worry us. After all, there are lots of sucky problems with Taken 3 and I don’t have time to get into them all. The two *main* problems, however, are these: firstly, while it’s as violent in intent as the previous films, its far less graphic in execution, leading to weird bloodless gunshot deaths and even a gore-free throat-slashing (though a waterboarding scene stays in). This is way more problematic than it sounds. Not just because of the dissonance, but because you end up wondering if there’s no blood for a special reason. Like, ‘Aha! It’s a switch, he’s not really dead!’ Only it’s not for that. It’s just an attempt to get a 12-certificate, and it’s lame.

The second Main Problem is the action sequences. They’re wretched. Typical of what’s rotten in the state of Taken 3 is a scene where Neeson drives his Porsche at a plane in order to stop it taking off. We cut to the Porsche approaching. We cut to a different shot of the Porsche, then another one. That’s three needlessly differing shots of the Porsche, and then we cut to the plane, the panicking passengers on the plane, then back to the Porsche. You get the picture? No, you don’t, that’s the problem. This is a scene whose exciting dynamic is based almost entirely on the proximity of a speeding sports car to an accelerating Lear jet, and yet we have to wait an age before we see plane and car in the same shot together. Ideally of course that shot would come at the beginning of the scene, and probably be repeated a couple of times a la a similar scene at the end of Bad Boys. Call me Poppy Peckinpah but I believe it’s known as an ‘establishing shot’. Time and time again, Taken 3 simply does without them, rendering action sequences, most of which are simple bread-and-butter fistfights and car chases — confusing, frustrating and ultimately boring. It was a problem with the previous instalment, too (same director: Olivier Megaton, whose Colombiana I quite liked) but somehow it’s even more apparent in this one, and makes what is already a fairly tepid experience into an almost unbearable one. ‘It ends here’ blurbs the poster. Let’s hope so.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

The Equalizer. Because that was pretty poor, right? But this is waaaaay poorer.

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