Taken 3, review: 'a tragedy'

Director: Olivier Megaton. Starring: Lian Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Forest Whitaker, Dougray Scott. Certificate: 12A. Running time: 109 minutes

Liam Neesons new film is the latest instalment in the Taken series of action movies, but theres no particular reason it should be. Though Taken 3 was co-written by franchise stalwarts Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, there's no obvious connection to Takens passim other than its focus on a middle-aged man wholl punch or shoot anyone with a Slavic accent.

Elaborate kidnappings and grimy European locations are out, while a nondescript wrong-man murder case that plays out amid the Californian urban sprawl is in. Did Besson and Kamen, along with their director, the occasionally combustible Olivier Megaton, perhaps take an unrelated thriller premise and Takenise it, in pursuit of greater box-office returns? Or did they really think the next chapter in the life of Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), the retired CIA operative with a very particular set of skills, should see him framed for the murder of his ex-wife by a brand new troupe of Russian scumbags, just when hes managed to shake the Albanians off?

Either way, since the events here are wholly unrelated to the previous films, Taken 3 makes Bryan seem less like a reluctant hero pressed back into service one last time than just stunningly unfortunate. He pops out for warm bagels, then comes home to find poor Lenore (Famke Janssen) spreadeagled on the futon with her throat slit. Maybe in Taken 4, Bryans car will be hit by a meteor, or a grand piano will fall on his head. If its a Serbian grand piano, its probably already being loaded on to a helicopter.

With nothing taken as such, other than arguably the biscuit, Bryan is faced with an unfamiliar new task: solving a murder while evading the Los Angeles Police Department, who are convinced hes the killer. Never mind that the victim was going through a messy split from her current husband (Dougray Scott), whos a wealthy arms dealer with links to the Russian mob. It must have been the motiveless ex-secret service guy! The police chase him all over town, but hes mostly able to get on with things, even finding the time to pop to a corner shop frequented by his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and stick a reassuring Post-it note on the Yakult.

Unlike Bryan, the film never works out where its off to next. Theres a smidgen of R.E.D. in the way our hero temporarily teams up with other retired agents to infiltrate an oligarchs lair (the half-hearted evil decor stretches to a stuffed and mounted crocodile on the coffee table), and a splodge or two of The Fugitive, not least of all in a scene in which Bryan escapes through a storm drain.

But each individual moment in the film barely seems to be on speaking terms with the rest. Theres a car chase out in the desert which might as well have been cut and pasted from a completely different movie: it takes the plot nowhere and ends with the chief henchman neglecting to check the wreckage of Bryans car for his body because its time to get drunk, which might as well be a direct quote from the writers room.

This is all a far cry from the original Taken film, the sheepish fun of which lay in seeing Neesons primal, fatherly rage being shaken out of retirement. Back then he was still Aslan, Kinsey, Rob Roy, Oskar Schindler, and the violence visceral and transgressive, rather than the bloodless, 12A-rated shoot-em-up stuff here felt like the eruption of a long-dormant volcano. Now its just Liam Neeson hitting people again. What a tragedy thats become boring.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/11326925/Taken-3-review-a-tragedy.html