Taken 3 Review

There are good movies and there are bad movies. There are also movies that are bad, but you enjoy them anyway because they're so irresistibly cheesy. I wouldn't quite put Taken 3 in the latter category, but there were definitely some guilty pleasure moments for me while I was watching the film. That being said, these moments were too few in number and were not substantial enough for me to leave the theater with anything but a dissatisfied feeling. Especially after two - in my humble opinion - solid action flicks.

I really enjoyed the first Taken. It was awesome seeing Liam Neeson transform into a modern action hero before our very eyes, and it's still a movie I go back to every now and then. Same goes for Taken 2, at least for me. Yeah, I was one of those 6 people that enjoyed the first sequel, mainly because it had a certain B-movie charm to it, like it didn't want to be taken seriously. So, I didn't take it seriously, and I enjoyed it for what it was. Unfortunately, Taken 3 represents the franchise at its most tired and sloppy, and I honestly wouldn't mind at all if T4ken never happened.

Liam Neeson stars as Bryan Mills once again. This was the role that catapulted him into action movie stardom, and he still owns it. The thing is, he's about the only convincing performer in the entire film, aside from maybe Forest Whitaker. Whitaker's role is too generic to be at all compelling, though. Neeson is the driving force. However, even he's not quite enough to save Taken 3 from its own cliches and misfires.


If there's one thing that upset me the most about this movie, it was definitely Olivier Megaton's inability to film action sequences well. It started to show in the last one, and it's on full display here. The guy just isn't good at it. He seems intent on shaking the camera and changing shots as much as humanly possible. At a certain point, it just becomes nauseating. Not entertaining. It seems unfortunate that, in an action movie, the action sucks. I don't know if he thinks it's stylish or something, but I hope he chooses to end his career as an action filmmaker. It's just not his forte.

The moments in Taken 3 that I actually liked were the scenes where Megaton is not shaking the camera, and Neeson is given space to do his own thing. Moments where he's trying to figure stuff out, and there are no guns going off or punches being thrown. Neeson has a compelling aura to him that somewhat reminded me of Harrison Ford's performance in the excellent 1993 thriller The Fugitive. That movie was really awesome, and you could tell Taken 3 was attempting to emulate it in many ways. It isn't near as effective, but there were some parts of the film that I found entertaining, and most of these parts were when it was trying to be a lot like The Fugitive. I guess I could fault the movie for being unoriginal. It wasn't too much of a distraction, though.

The plot is basically nonexistent. The film tries to be smart and clever with its twists and turns, but it just ends up being utterly uninteresting and, quite honestly, far too convoluted to be effective. It strayed away from the straightforwardness of its two predecessors. And, strangely enough, I found this to be both its greatest strength and its most crippling weakness. It's a strength because of the aforementioned moments of Liam Neeson as a fugitive, solving the murder of his wife while also being chased down by Forest Whitaker. This provided the only moments of real entertainment for me. However, it's a weakness because Taken 3 has none of the darkness or edge of the original two films. It feels far too much like a generic Hollywood sequel to retain that edge.

All in all, Taken 3 proves to be a disappointment, despite some entertaining scenes involving Liam Neeson and Forest Whitaker. The action scenes are too incoherent to be exciting, the story makes no attempt to actually make sense, and the whole project just feels like a haphazard effort. It's not something to go out and see in theaters, though for undemanding action junkies, it might be something to rent. My last thought is this: if they ever do decide to make more Taken films, they better fire Megaton. He's the franchise's most considerable hindrance at this point.

C