At its core,
the original 'Taken' was a fairly run of the mill action movie
with a lot of familiar run of the mill elements. A
singular badass against a gaggle of really horrible people who
have done him and his wrong. However 'Taken' took those
run of the mill action film elements and cooked them up in a
way that made it awesome. Legendary almost.
'Taken', as an action movie, is now spoken in hushed tones by
action movie fans along with the likes of 'Die Hard', or
'Lethal Weapon', or 'The Professional' and 'Man on
Fire'. But the two 'Taken' sequels have become what the
original 'Taken' managed to avoid being… that is run of the
mill action movies. Sub run of the mill action movies
actually. Action movies so rote and pedestrian that it
almost taints the original.
Brian Mills (Liam Neeson) is back and living in Los Angeles,
his relationship with his college aged daughter Kimmy (Maggie
Grace) is rock solid, and in the couple of years since 'Taken
2', his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Jannsen) is still married to the
super rich schlub, and has grown supremely tired of, the
slippery Stuart St. John (Dougray Scott), who looks absolutely
nothing like he did in the first movie. Hey, when your
first husband was blessed with a special set of skills, it's
hard to find somebody to measure up to that… know what I'm
sayin'? No matter how much money he has.
You've seen the trailer, you know nobody gets 'Taken' this
time and instead somebody get tragically murdered and Brian
gets framed for it. The cops have Brian cornered,
there's no way out, he is trapped… whatever. The first
incredibly frantic, almost impossible to follow action
sequence has taken place and our movie is set to begin.
Hot on Brian's trail is super smart LAPD detective Frank
Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), and while he has his doubts about
Brian's guilt, that is not his job as he is always one step
behind the super spy. Since Brian has already killed the
entire male population of Albania, today's recipients of
Brian's specialized sets of skills are some Russians, in
particular the Russian evil dude Oleg Malankov (Sam Spruell)
who I guess is in business with Lenore's current husband, a
business that went bad, which is probably the reason why
Lenore met her unfortunate fate.
And so it
goes. Brian uses his skills, beats up people, tortures
people, kills people in a very bloodless, PG-13 way… and this
time he even brings in his homeboys into the operation who use
their specialized skills to help out. I liked the guy on
the team with the specialized skill of looking through
binoculars and letting the squad know when people left the
scene. I think I could totally do that!
Regardless of all of that, faceless goons die, revenge is
about to be had, and as bonus Kimmy even finds a way to get
sort of Taken. And it is all so unimpressive, it is
barely worth even talking about.
So Europa and Team Besson decided to go in a new direction
with this installment of 'Taken', or rather they rented the
DVD from the 'The Fugitive' and just chose to go in that
direction. But I'm not mad at them for trying to
coattail off of 'The Fugitive' because that film was an iconic
action movie in its own right. You see, action movie
fans are a forgiving sort. Originality speaking, there's
only so much that one can do so we are used to seeing the same
stories used over and over again. Another thing action
movie fans tend to let slide is that action movies have
narratives which don't always connect dots. Tend not to
make too much sense. For instance, in this movie it
looks like Lenore has been dead for a while before Brian found
her, her throat slashed, not a drop of blood in his house, so
this body has obviously been moved. Two minutes of
police work would've easily absolved Brian Mills of the crime,
but where's the fun in that? We let that slide.
What is more difficult to let slide by are action sequences
that are almost incomprehensible. But alas, this is the
style of director Olivier Megaton as in every single one of
his movies that I have seen, he uses a technique that can only
be termed as 'spastic cam', and an editing technique we will
generously call Mega Cuts. Why use one cut when ten
seems to work so much better? All of the action
sequences in 'Taken 3', and the previous film which Megaton
also directed, suffer from this malady, but none more so than
the tour de force freeway sequence in which it is darn near
impossible to get a feel for what was going in that scene,
when it should've easily been the best scene in the
movie.
Now, instead of actually enjoying the action sequences, you
are now just impatiently waiting for them to end, unless you
brought along a Dramamine. This kind of forces us to
focus on Action Movie nonsense that we regularly would've
ignored. Such as Brian Mills now being a god and
possessing time displacement transporting skills. Or
that our villains in this one are the lamest set of villains
yet. Or keeping Kimmy safe… which is his number one
priority… by taking her along on his final death defying raid
against murderous Russian killers. Or asking
ourselves, at the end of the movie, even if Brian Mills is
cleared of his wife's murder, there is still a good 100 other
or so murders, and other crimes he committed in this movie
that warrants him not being able to simply walk out of a
police station. There's more, but why bother? The
point is we don't ask these questions when our action movie is
actually working.
I don't know what director Pierre Morrel did to fall out of
favor at Europa, perhaps he made an inappropriate solicitation
of Mrs. Besson at the company Christmas party of something,
but he is missed. Now I have to go back and re-watch
'Taken' to remind myself exactly why I enjoyed that movie so
much in the first place.
