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Wednesday, January 14, 2015

MOVIE REVIEW Taken 3
 An Old Dog, With No New Tricks


Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills in "Taken 3", directed by Olivier Megaton.  Fox
       
by Thomas Gregorich/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Wednesday, January 14, 2015

 Taken 3 is a careless three-quel.  Those involved don’t seem to care, and neither do the viewers.  It raked in $14.7 million on its first day, taking the top spot.  This ranking is the only way the film has justified its own existence.  It could have been something more, like Taken, the best of the three installments, if its formula of Bronson-style vigilante justice, anchored by a father-saves-daughter relationship that anyone will swoon for, hadn’t been rehashed twice (two times too many) in Taken and Taken 2.  But the third and ostensibly last film in the franchise isn’t here to give people something new and enjoyable.  It gives them what they paid for last time, again and again and again, with less oomph in each iteration.

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is an ex-black ops “preventer” with “a very particular skill-set”.  He can find anyone, and when he does, he can kill them.  How exactly does one phrase that on their resume?  These days he’s content with being a good father to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), playing golf with his ex-CIA pals, and clandestinely reconnecting with his ex-wife (Famke Janssen), who is unhappy in her marriage to the affluent Stuart, played by a sallow, shrewd Dougray Scott.  Stuart is at the whim of gangsters who domineer his family with extortion.  The trouble is that Stuart and Mills share this family, as well as its unfavorable circumstances.  (You can see, from too many miles away, where this is going.)  Mills is framed for a crime committed by Russian mobsters, and so begins the race to exculpate himself and--here we go again--bring justice to those who threatened his family.

A quiet storm, Neeson has a way of elevating run-of-the-mill action flicks with his towering presence and assuredly intimidating one-liners.  He excels at characters who remain composed during crises while everyone else panics.  For instance, he gave people a reason to sit through The Grey, a movie about killer wolves that never reaches climax. He is generally a saving grace, but no one could rescue Taken 3 from itself.

This film is riddled with implausibility like a road with too many potholes.  The larger ones strike such a blow to the viewer’s willingness to suspend disbelief that even the little ones grow exceedingly difficult to ignore.  In an early scene, Mills is chased by police and runs into a garage that just happens to have a trap door dumping into the L.A. river, which rushes like the Colorado River, even though in real life it’s bone dry. How Mills knows there is a trap door--well, the writers probably don’t even know.  Later, a child throws a full plate of spaghetti onto the floor of a diner, and the plate doesn’t break or even spill. 

There’s a point at which the intelligence can’t be any more insulted and one can only laugh.  One such moment occurs in the anti-climactic final shoot out, when Mills grabs a thug’s assault rifle, presses it against his chest, and grunts, killing the man instantly.  Cause of death: unknown.  We’re expected to believe this makes sense because it’s Liam Neeson.  We’re expected to believe the same thing about the movie.

Taken 3 doesn’t coast into stupidity like other silly action films.  The absurdity is there from the beginning, and it only gets worse.  The opening scene introduces a villain who is henceforth excluded from the plot until the very end.  Nearly half of the film is a trivial cat-and-mouse game--about as exciting as a cat swatting at a mouse--between Mills and a clever detective (Forest Whitaker), with the lumbering Neeson popping out of car trunks he can barely fit his 6’ 4” frame inside, and somehow outrunning younger police officers at the pace you’d expect of a man who has grown a bit long in the tooth. 

There’s zero face-to-face action between Mills and the villain, Malankov, an icy, scarfaced ex-KGB thug (Sam Spruell), who isn’t given requisite screentime until it’s way too late to build up tension.  (Picture, if you will, not knowing about Keyser Soze’s sinister background until the very end of The Usual Suspects.)  We don’t know how bad this guy is until just before the finale, and then he shows up wearing tighty whiteys.  The ensuing shootout quickly degrades into awkward fumbling between hero and villain with as much sexual tension as the lead-up to the first love scene in Brokeback Mountain.

What’s missing from Taken 3 is the engaging family element and brutal action that made Taken effective as a super-dad fantasy.  When criminals kidnap his daughter, no one is more capable of rescuing her than Mills, who usually broods humbly in the shadow of yet another perversely rich businessman who has wooed his ex-wife and daughter with Audis and pet stallions.  I found it satisfying to watch quiet and noble Mills man-up to save the day in spite of his shortcomings as a provider.  But this time around, Kim isn’t kidnapped, but safely guarded by the police throughout the film.  Where’s the fun in that? 

The first incarnation of Taken was intoxicating, but the third film has failed to improve upon or even maintain the potency of its formula.  Instead, incoherent plotting and befuddling action sequences have crowded out its essence.  From the first sip of Taken 3, we can tell we’ve been served watered-down whiskey.

The film’s tagline is “It Ends Here.”  This reviewer can only hope that the filmmakers keep their promise.
Also with: Leland Orser, Don Harvey, David Warshofsky.

"Taken 3", is now in theaters across the U.S. and Canada, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association Of America for intense sequences of violence and action, and for brief strong language.  Its running time is one hour and 49 minutes.
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