Did anyone really wonder how Neeson’s growly ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills would react when bad guys get too close to his family, yet again? No, but viewers will wonder what’s happening in the action scenes, since director Olivier Megaton (dun-dun-dun!, is the proper reaction to that name) apparently filmed them all with a camera strapped to the head of a chicken. Then it was all edited together for maximum confusion by a chef at Benihana.
In the first half, though, it’s all slow burn. Mills is an awkward dad — again! -- around his collegiate daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). Kim was taken by human traffickers in the 2008 original. Mills lopes back home to his modest L.A. motel apartment, where he’s visited by his ex-wife, Kim’s mom, Lenore (Famke Janssen). Lenore was taken by Albanian mobsters in 2012 sequel. She’s very unhappy with her new hubby, the superwealthy Stuart (Dougray Scott, playing it all as a smarm-fest).
Too bad Mills doesn’t have any relatives, since “Taken 3” relies upon one of his immediate family members again getting abducted and being a victim of, well, let’s just call it the Big Taken. A quirky but sharp police detective (Forest Whitaker) is on the case, which seems to point to Mills as the culprit. But there are some shadowy Russian mobsters lurking about, as Mills chases around L.A. only to discover the real villain is pretty close to home.
L.A.? After the earlier films zipped around Paris and Istanbul, respectively, Megaton and cowriter/coproducer Luc “Hack-a-ton” Besson offer dingy, familiar locales filmed in grungy Cheap-o-Scope. Dudes, show some effort.
That goes for Neeson as well. Actually, if the often laughable “Taken 3” — in which one man, while talking to another man, actually says, “Let’s talk man-to-man, as it were” — serves any purpose, it’s to show how that there actually is a distinction to Neeson’s action flicks from the last 10 years. “The Grey” and “A Walk Among the Tombstones” are up to snuff; “The A-Team,” “Taken 2” and now “Taken 3” are low points.
In fact, with no one really left to kidnap and ticket prices being what they are, here it’s the audience that gets taken.
