96 Hours - Taken 3

I love this series. I can't for life of me understand why anybody would review this poorly, yet I see bad reviews. Clearly those people are nitpicking. This is a classy action film. It follows really well in the footsteps of those that proceeded it. Liam Neeson is just a great action star. He knows when to pour it on, and when to back off so it's not too much. That's really important in this genre, because any misstep can easily make the movie look phony, cheap - or just bad acting.

The only absurd part of the movie was the swapping out of actors for Stuart St. John's part. The first movie had him as a kind, old balding man and in this film he's been transformed into a suave, young, tanned husband. Huh? It serves the movie well, but doesn't follow what we saw in the first film with any accuracy.

This movie has all the essential elements of the first TAKEN - just distributed slightly differently. Forest Whitaker adds a nice touch.

This is an action movie worth watching. Hollywood - please make TAKEN 4!!

Liam Neeson returns to the role of Bryan Mills, a government operative with a "particular set of skills", who gets framed for the murder of one of his nearest and dearest - - I don't do spoilers, but the trailer neatly does: thanks a bunch trailer! Knowing his innocence, and not taking any s**t from anyone, Mills goes on the run to get to the bottom of who framed him and make them pay. Hindering Mills more than helping him is police chief Franck Dotzler (Forest Whitaker) who is not only dogged in his pursuit of Mills as the key suspect but also extremely smart, trying to piece together the complex three-way relationship between Mills, his ex-wife Lenore (Bond-girl Famke Jansson) and her current husband Stuart (MI-2's Dougray Scott). Staying just one step ahead of the pursuing cops, Bryan's focus rapidly turns to his daughter Kim Bauer - oh, sorry, wrong franchise - Kim Mills (Maggie Grace) and keeping her safe from the bad guys.

Taken 2 was an energetic roller-coaster of a thriller also directed by Olivier Megaton (note: not his name at birth!) and to give Taken 3 a bit of credit parts of this film - following a painfully slow start with a lot of wordy exposition - live up to popcorn-munching past glories. Some of the lines - especially those of the whip-smart Dotzler - are entertaining. And, in particular, Neeson does a very amusing variant of his famous 'telephone answering message' at the denouement of the film. Apart from a damp squib of a final scene (probably hastily written as they were in the pub) the script by the same Taken team of Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen is passable.

In general though, this film is all over the place.

Editing is of the frenetic Bourne variety but not to the same standard: a specific and horrible example is an early car chase which is almost incoherent in the way it is staged and cut together. And whilst a lot of the staged violence in the first two films was over-the-top escapism, some of the action in this film makes no logical sense whatsoever: I could perhaps believe that body used as a shield might stop a handgun bullet - but a high powered sub-machine gun? Please!

To top this off, two separate incidents with Mills in exploding cars simply defy any possible suspension of disbelief: this was more like Neeson in a film remake of the "indestructible" Captain Scarlett TV series than a supposedly realistic film.

This may be a personal view, but I have a long-standing loathing of the movie trait of bumping off a key character at the start of a sequel after you, as the viewer, have invested the emotional energy in the previous film rooting for them to survive. (Alien 3 is probably the most heinous example of this crime, with the first-reel death of the little girl 'Newt'). Adding a final-reel tragic twist (as in Skyfall, or The Amazing Spiderman 2) is fine in my book. But this particular type of cheap storytelling trick just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So go and see Taken 3 if you are happy to park your brain at the door and buy a bumper box of popcorn, but this is far from a classic and is a particularly stark coming down to movie-earth for me two days after watching the brilliant "Whiplash".

(If you enjoyed this review please see my other reviews at bob-the-movie-man.com and enter your email address to receive future posts. Thanks).

3 stars might be a little harsh seeing as I did enjoy this film, but I enjoyed it for all the wrong reasons. Seemed like a movie made by idiots for idiots. Anyone who is mildly intelligent will find it laughable.

Where do I start, the way this film was shot was poor at best, no scene lasted longer the 3 minutes to try and achieve the same relentless pace we enjoyed from the first Taken movie. This was even worse during any action sequence where there would be about 20 different shots in a space of 30 seconds showing pretty much the same event from pointless angles.

The dialogue, so cheesy, they put in every cliché line from any action movie you can think of, one dimensional characters sounding like idiots. There was a moment in this film where Mills plugs in a USB into a LAPD computer and the computers voices says "You are currently accessing the LAPD hidden files" just in case people in the cinema missed this.

This movie treats its audience like they are slow, and I feel you actually have to be to enjoy it for what it is. Some of the actions sequences were so unrealistic even a 9 your boy would find it a push to believe let alone us adults. Poor way to end a dying trilogy. Hopefully it will now stay dead.

This is my biggest guilty pleasure of all time, I know this film is God awful, from the directing to the writing and the stereotypical villain but I honestly don't care it was just popcorn entertainment and seeing Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills is always good. The plot of this film is basically the plot of The Fugitive. This film is so bad it's good and that's why I give this film 6/10.

One of the worst movie editing I've ever seen in my life for an action movie. That killed the movie for me. I think they should just withdraw Taken 2 and Taken 3 and admit that they should have stopped at the first one.

This movie was so boring, and when you expected to see some action scenes, you were getting yourself in the paranoid mind of a director who wanted to experiment on the poor audience. My eyes still hurt from the crappy editing of this movie.

Guys please stop here, enough, no more Taken sequels. With each one of them you're killing the hype that the first one created.