Once, Twice, Three Times a Taking: TAKEN 3

Taken 3 is the least in its series, which in turn has been among the least of star Liam Neeson’s recent spate of action roles. Unlike his good to great films of late (The Grey, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Non-Stop), these movies are only about how many people Neeson’s Bryan Mills, an ex-special ops guy with a particular set of skills, has to kill to get a member of his family back from the bad guys. The first had a single-mindedness that worked for it more than not, especially if you can ignore its uglier vigilante tendencies. The second wasn’t even that good, but at least had its moments of committed goofiness, like grenade-based echolocation. This third time around, it’s just lazy, requiring bigger jolts to get less effect. Now he has to kill a whole bunch of people just to feel better about losing a loved one, this taking being of a more permanent kind.

After much throat-clearing exposition, Mills discovers the murder of his ex-wife (Famke Janssen, turning up for a cameo that’s half corpse). He just got back to his apartment after buying fresh bagels and finds her dead in his bed, bloody knife left dripping nearby. The cops aren’t far behind. Naturally, they think he did it, so he goes on the run to clear his name, protect his now-college aged daughter (Maggie Grace), and find the people responsible. As the detective on the case and on the chase, Forest Whitaker, who hilariously eats the fresh bagels out of the active crime scene, interviews the ex-wife’s husband (Dougray Scott) who asks if this has to do with those two times Mills got caught up in nasty business overseas. Whitaker’s reaction to the question is so underplayed to be nonexistent. It’s like he hears about suspects’ serial vigilante killing sprees everyday. Maybe he’s seen the earlier movies too.

Neeson spends the entirety of the movie on the run in a sleepy riff on The Fugitive. The reasons for this are protracted and stupid, easily the stupidest plot co-writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen have yet concocted. It’s not just absurd. I could handle that. It’s wholly unnecessary. Neeson flees the authorities, pursuing his own sense of justice despite A.) a solid alibi, and B.) almost immediately discovering video evidence that, if turned over to Whitaker, would point cops directly to the real baddies. I mean, I know Neeson’s the best of the best, but wouldn’t he rather clear his name and let the police arrest the clearly guilty bad guys? I guess he prefers the collateral damage implied in a reckless chase down a freeway, an explosion on a college campus, and a shootout in a skyscraper. It makes it hard to disagree when, late in the game, Scott turns to Grace and says, “Your dad’s a homicidal maniac!”

This superfluous running, jumping, shooting, punching, and chasing (all PG-13 bloodless, naturally) would be better off if we could at least enjoy it. But there’s a sense of mercenary profit-based laziness involved, as if everyone did the least they could to get the paycheck by pumping out another entry in the brand. Barely comprehensible action scenes are a perfect compliment to the dumb connective tissue between them. This is director Olivier Megaton’s sloppiest deployment of chaos cinema, quick edits and haphazardly framed shaky cam hiding most effects and many causes in the dimly imagined action. Worst, it obscures how Neeson gets out of most of his close calls. At one point he backs his car down an elevator shaft, plummets several stories, and groans. Then the car explodes, elaborately and with many angles. After an edit, we find he’s on the phone in a different location. How’d he do that? I get the feeling no one knows and, worse, no one cares. I know I don’t.

Brother & Sister Act: HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS

I’m sure you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel, two little kids, brother and sister, who get lost in the woods and find their way to a cabin made of candy. Inside sits a witch, ready to fatten them up and cook them for dinner. They manage to burn her in her own oven and escape. And that’s that. It’s a nice story, isn’t it? What Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters supposes is that this childhood encounter left the kids with a talent for slaying sorceresses, a talent they take on the road, roaming the countryside from village to village, peddling their ability to liberate towns from the terror of witchcraft in their midst. We pick up with them as adults, walking into a village that has been hit by a string of kidnappings, youngsters spirited away by shadowy magic into the blackest part of the forest never to be heard from again. Hansel and Gretel take the case, promising to slay the witch(es) involved and return the kids to their parents.

Writer-director Tommy Wirkola (of the lame Nazi zombie half-comedy Dead Snow) came up with an inventive twist on a Grimm tale and then stopped there, wanly elaborating upon a simple story until it becomes yet another dour, emotionless action movie. It charmed me at first, in its opening minutes at least, but all too quickly became plodding and predictable, running through its repetitive motions. The violence is splashily over-the-top, giving the characters rapid-fire crossbows, heavy firearms and the standard hyper-competence in murkily choreographed, supposedly improvisatory hand-to-hand combat. Witches are slashed apart in gruesome ways and return the favor by casting spells that cause men to eat bugs and explode or get stepped upon by a troll, which sends what looks like grape jelly splattering under the beast’s boot. And not a bit of it is exciting or involving in the slightest.  

The plot proceeds dumbly and dutifully through one of the simplest, most emotionally and creatively uncomplicated possible versions of this concept. As the adult Hansel and Gretel, Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, who are generally appealing actors even in dry material, appear to be going through the motions dispirited and listless. They are without chemistry of any kind, between each other or anyone else in the cast and the movie calls upon them to do very little with what amounts to nothing more than cardboard action stereotypes dressed up in fairy tale drag. Little creative touches – Hansel suffers from diabetes as a result of eating too much of that witch’s house way back when – seem dropped in out of nowhere and come to mean very little in the scheme of things.

Filling out the rest of the cast is a nice group of supporting actors, from Famke Janssen as the Big Bad Witch to Peter Stormare as a skeptical sheriff and Thomas Mann as a village teen with an exceedingly understandable crush on Gretel. Their contributions are nonstarters as well, ground under by the empty spectacle. It’s a goofy movie that refuses to overtly comment upon its own goofiness while at the same time carefully avoiding taking itself seriously. It’s an odd, uncommitted stance for such potentially enjoyable trash to take. As is, it plays like someone went into the editing room and scrupulously snipped out every bit of humor and excitement, leaving only an 88-minute husk of a good idea, a one-joke movie that never even finds the energy to tell it with any skill.

Grudge Report: TAKEN 2

Taken 2, like Taken before it, delivers on its promise. These movies can do so simply by not promising all that much to begin with. These are nothing more than well-made junk, advertising and providing relentless forward momentum, parental vengeance, and Liam Neeson’s grade-A gravitas. The first time around, his ex-CIA agent punched, kicked, shot and shocked his way through the Parisian underground after his vacationing daughter (Maggie Grace) found herself kidnapped by human traffickers. The movie didn’t have much in the way of plot or character, but it was short and fast, blessed with an unstoppable force of a protagonist in Neeson, whose every growl and scowl landed strongly. He used his height and seriousness to create his menacing demeanor. It doesn’t hurt that he also got to rumble out an instantly iconic action movie monologue, one that finds him calmly, gravely informing his daughter’s kidnappers that he has “a particular set of skills…” warning them of swift retribution that sure enough comes to pass.

Now, in the grand tradition of Die Hard 2 and Speed 2 and Death Wish 2, a movie about a more or less regular person in an extraordinary action-thriller scenario is followed up by a movie about that same exact regular person ending up in a shockingly similar scenario. This time, Neeson, vacationing in Istanbul with his daughter and ex-wife (Famke Janssen), finds himself taken. He recognizes this inevitability soon enough to call his daughter back at the hotel and tell her the bad news in a pale echo of the first movie’s great monologue. “Your mother…and I…are about to be…taken.” This time the daughter has to rescue the father, who in turn must rescue his ex-wife. He wiggles out of his restraints soon enough that most of the movie he gets to fight his way to his wife and daughter while trying to take out the threats in between.

But who are the kidnappers this time? They’re none other than aggrieved friends and family of some of the bad guys Neeson maimed, killed, or otherwise hurt in the first film. Led by Rade Serbedzija as the scowling father of the guy Neeson electrocuted, this band of anonymous vengeful others are out for Neeson’s blood. I like the idea of a sequel to a movie of mostly consequence-free violence basing its entire plot around providing consequences to that film’s actions. That this movie continues and expands upon its predecessor’s slight case of xenophobia, in which all foreigners are both undeveloped characters and mindless plot-device aggressors, is disappointing. The film is filled with stage-setting shots that linger on burqas and mosques while the sound of an unseen muezzin filters through the background noise and the villains make their way towards our protagonists. Instead of using its locale as a picturesque backdrop for action, the film feels like nothing more than cheap exoticism as code for threat in ways the feel awfully tired.

Still, the grudge-driven plot seems fitting, even if writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen ultimately have once again used their narrative hook only to provide quick, satisfying bursts of action sequences sprinkled with a moderate amount of connective tension. Director Olivier Megaton (with a name like that, you hardly have to go on to describe him as a French action director) films the car chases, shootouts, explosions and hand-to-hand combat with a slick competency (and with strangely sanitized PG-13 brutality). The benefit of the movie being little more than one long chase scene is that there’s no wasted time and there’s no reason to feel cheated. It is exactly what it wants to be and no more than what little it promises. And there’s still some time for occasional moments of mild invention, like when Neeson manages to call his daughter and walk her through the details of using a map, a shoestring, a pen, and a grenade to pinpoint his location.

Taken 2 doesn’t live up to the modest surprise of its predecessor. For one thing, the novelty is gone. Neeson’s character is hyper-competent, so much so that surprise is not really in the cards. When the situation is at its most dire and he tells his wife that everything is going to be okay, of course I believed him. And that’s really all that matters here. The movie is dependent entirely upon how willing the audience is to see Neeson run through the streets of a foreign city, fighting bad guys every step of the way in order to restore safety to his family. As a sequel, narratively speaking it’s an afterthought. As a movie unto itself, there’s just not much to it beyond what little it promises. But I guess that’s the point.