Taken 3 Movie Review

The original Taken landed quite the hard-hitting punch on audiences on its debut in 2008. Ever since then the surprise hit has gradually declined from what made it work; the trilogy comes to a close with Taken 3 which will easily go down as one of the most muted and poorly produced final chapters in the action genre’s long history.

The plot of Taken, what little there is of it takes place almost entirely in Los Angeles; Brian Mills (Liam Neeson), his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) are living happily when suddenly Mills finds Lenore dead in his flat. Framed for the murder, Mills must track down those responsible for Lenore’s death and also protect his daughter once again. If this premise sounds all too familiar, you’ll know from the offset exactly where the film is going. Taken 2 was derivative enough but Taken 3 sinks to a far lower level; not only does the film repeat plot points from its predecessors but it outright rips off other action contemporaries such as The Fugitive, Die Hard and The Transporter. Without an original bone in its body the film ploughs along at a blindingly quick rate, often glossing over any kind of character development or exposition in seconds. What made the series what it was has disappeared completely; even the character at its centre has run out of tricks to keep the audience watching, making Taken 3’s plot an uninteresting and disjointed wreak.

The lone positive attribute of Taken 3 is the performances from the main actors; despite the downright anaemic amount of material given for development, Liam Neeson and Maggie Grace still have relatively good chemistry on screen, resulting in a consistently believable bond. The other characters however are practically non-existent; they have no personal traits, no internal struggles, nothing to distinguish them from the clichéd police characters that have been in numerous other action films. Forest Whittaker’s performance as Inspector Frank Dotzler is especially disappointing given the actor’s strong reputation. The same also applies to the villain (played by Sam Spruell for about fifteen minutes), who for the most part is completely absent from the film’s proceedings and does little other than filling the overly used cliché of an angry Russian who just wants money. Ultimately any decent performances by the main actors are quickly buried under a mound of woefully underdeveloped side characters which veer too far from the film’s once realistic tone.

The action sequences featured in the Taken series, particularly the first film have been known for their gritty, pseudo-realistic action sequences. For the final film in the series, any pretence of this has been completely thrown out the window. The action here is some of the most nauseating and poorly edited I’ve ever seen in an action film; every time something fast paced occurs like a car chase or fist fight, the film furiously jumps between at least fifty cuts or more whilst constantly shaking the camera in a bid to make the action seem more intense. This is exacerbated even further by the film’s 12A rating; the moments where the series stood out for its hand-to hand combat have been replaced with toned down sequences that do nothing to set themselves apart from other action films. A senseless use of music utterly fails to convey any kind of emotion in a film where it does not belong. The technical presentation of Taken 3 has taken arguably the biggest step back from the original film which honestly leaves little to salvage from the overall experience.

Taken 3 is quite the epitome of a tired serious floundering about in the mud for its final instalment before its inevitable demise; aside from the main actors doing a half decent job of selling the characters that have been present from the beginning, the film really doesn’t have anything going for it. This is surely high time for both the series and the archetype it spawned to retire for good.

Rating: 1/5 Stars