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.

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.

Prisoners in Space: LOCKOUT

If you want to see a modern B-movie that feels half-heartedly assembled out of a jumble of influences (that sounds kinder than rip-offs without going so far as to say homage), you could do worse than Lockout. Of course, you could do better, too. It’s been cobbled together by the directors Stephen St. Leger and James Mather and their co-writer, French genre auteur Luc Besson, into something that could be called Escape from Con Air…in Space! (Or how about Die Hard on a Penal Space Station?) Anyways, it’s a futuristic hostage situation aboard an orbital prison. Even the main character, a sardonic, loose cannon special agent named Snow, seems derivative, a mashup of John McClane and Snake Plisken with a sizable helping of just about every Harrison Ford character.

Guy Pearce plays him as a wiseacre who barely seems to care that he’s framed for the murder of a fellow agent and, when the movie starts, is being interrogated by a puffy, goateed Peter Stormare. Turns out Snow might have a way out of this trouble coming right up. As he’s being beaten in an undisclosed location, the president’s daughter (Maggie Grace) is on a humanitarian mission to see if this whole space jail thing is on the up and up. A member of her security detail hides his gun rather than check it at the door, so it’s no surprise when a particularly creepy prisoner (Joseph Gilgun) manages to grab it and go. Somehow he can then single-handedly blow apart the security of the supposed maximum-security institution and release all his fellow nasty convicts to run amuck and hold the guards (and their presidential-adjacent guest) hostage.

So there goes Snow, rocketing up to the orbiting space prison where the plan is that he’ll sneak in, find the president’s daughter, and launch out with her in an escape pod. There are a few complications along the way to execute said plan, but it’s as straightforward as it sounds. Hostages are menaced, the law enforcement control room is filled with fretting and communication difficulties, and Pearce and Grace run up and down clanging gunmetal-grey corridors. Guns are waved, buttons are pressed, one-liners are wisecracked, and my interest slipped away. Sure it’s derivative and simple-minded, but the premise is good enough that Leger and Mather’s dull-but-frantic direction and the bungled script are still disappointing.

The idea of a prison in space is kind of irresistible though. I wanted to know more. At one point, a breathless tech explains that, since the man with the job to somehow keep the whole thing afloat has been killed by the escapees, the place is falling out of orbit. We’re treated to a scene in which the space station collides with the falling prison and rips open a wall, flash-freezing a prisoner caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But why would you need someone to keep the thing in orbit? Surely by 2070, this is something that could be automated.

The prison is also equipped with seemingly automatic machine gun turrets that interfere with rescue attempts by an orbital police station. A portion of the finale is devoted to quick scenes of police spaceships zipping around the exterior of the space prison dodging bullets and returning fire, even barreling down metallic trenches to fire off missiles into the construction’s weak spot like it’s some kind of Death Star. Now why would the space station have this weaponized security system? We only see governmental spaceships in this movie, so there’s no reason to believe there’d be anyone attacking this thing from the outside.

But who cares, really? This is a movie that promises a certain modest level of dumb spectacle and serves it up. (Don’t even get me started on the climactic heavy-duty parachute scene, which is so stupid I kind of love it.) It’s mostly flavorless and sometimes confusing, but served up nonetheless. Characters don’t really come into focus. Beyond Pearce and Grace, it’s barely possible to tell the prisoners apart or to pick up on their strategy, let alone their goals or desires. How, exactly, do they plan on escaping? Who knows what they’re planning to do? Meanwhile, the agents feeding Snow directions just sit around wringing their hands and gathering their space fleet. It’s just tepid chaos on both sides battling around a space prison I could barely understand. The movie never sinks all the way to terrible, but can’t get up near good either. After a while I wasn’t watching it so much as simply waiting it out.