Taken 3

Liam Neeson proves that he can still growl and glower with the best of them, but Taken 3 is a rather shabby installment in the franchise that made him an action star in the first place.  The ad campaign suggests that this is the end of the series, and I'm all for that decision.  if this is any indication, the filmmakers are starting to run out of ideas.

The first two films were ludicrous hostage thrillers.  This one is a ludicrous murder thriller.  Since nobody exactly gets "taken" this time around, the title doesn't really fit, except that it's the franchise name.  The opening moments depict a fairly ordinary life for Neeson's character, ex-government operative Bryan Mills.  He's still friendly with his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), and is even trying to help her through her recent emotional rough patch with her current husband, Stuart (Dougray Scott).  Bryan and Lenore's daughter, Kim, seems to have been written as a 19 or 20-year-old, yet is played by the 31-year-old Maggie Grace.  She's recently found out that she's pregnant, but doesn't know how to tell her dad.  One day, Bryan gets a text message from his ex-wife, telling him to stop by her house and talk.  He lets himself in, happens to see a small amount of blood in the hallway, and then finds Lenore lying on the bed murdered from stab wounds.

This is not exactly a spoiler, as the film's trailer and ad campaign has already revealed this information.  All I can say about the murder is it's a lucky thing Bryan came upon that blood in the hall, because if he hadn't, he probably wouldn't be able to tell she was dead.  There's not a single drop of blood in the murder scene, not even on the weapon.  I know that this is a PG-13 movie, and that kind of restricts the amount of blood they can show on screen.  However, the crime scene is so tidy and meticulous, it's kind of laughable.  Some cops bust in, see Bryan standing over the body, and immediately assume he did it.  He handles them easily, and makes a daring escape from pursuing officers.  This is the first big action sequence in the film, and the first sign that something is not quite right here.

Call me crazy, but I tend to like it when I can tell what is going on during an action sequence.  It helps if the camera lingers on a shot for a certain amount of time, so the brain can register what it is supposed to be looking at.  In Taken 3, this and every action scene that follows afterward, seems to be made up of hundreds of tiny cuts that seem to last only a split second or less.  Most movies might feature a five second shot of Liam Neeson running down the street.  This film divides those five seconds into five individual cuts for whatever reason, cutting literally each second.  What's odd is that the director, Olivier Megaton (who helmed the last Taken film), doesn't seem to be trying to hide anything.  He's doing this constant rapid editing as some kind of bizarre artistic choice.  Even when there's no need for a cut, we get about 10 of them in what seems like a span of seven seconds.  This is some of the most obnoxious editing I have seen in a long time.

The slower and more plot-driven moments fortunately don't rely on this rapid editing technique.  Unfortunately, these moments are so slow and labored they feel like they should have been sped up.  Bryan goes on the run, with a police Inspector named Franck Dotzler (Forrest Whitaker) heading the investigation.  Whitaker delivers the best performance here, and it's a shame the script doesn't use him or develop him more.  Both Bryan and Franck do their own separate investigations into the murder, and it looks like the job was pulled off by some Russian bad guys.  But, there's someone behind it all, and it's not hard to figure out who it is while watching the film.  The movie even gives us a "subtle" hint by focusing directly on the character's face during a key early scene to show him giving a nervous glance for seemingly no reason.  Basically, anyone who cannot figure out who the real villain is the moment they're introduced is exactly the audience this movie is looking for.  And they should probably go to the movies more often.

Taken 3 is a cut and dry murder thriller that never manages to build any tension, due to the total lack of suspense, and its obnoxious action scene editing.  I was not exactly a supporter of the earlier films, but at least they had some really off the wall moments that kind of made me smile.  Here, the franchise seems to run out of gas, as there's nothing really up on the screen to grab our attention.  It's only January, and we've already had two unneeded sequels in a row.  The good news is, things can only go up from here.

See related merchandise at Amazon.com!

0 comments