The “Taken” series is one of the more peculiar cinematic delights of the last half dozen years — a guilty pleasure only for guilty and ridiculous fun for everybody else. These movies work if you take them seriously, and they work if you don’t. But appeal is more complicated than that: If you’re laughing, you still get swept up; and if you get swept up, you still end up laughing.
The real mystery is whether the man at the center of the action, Liam Neeson, knows these movies are partly hilarious. He must know, and yet he never cracks, never allows himself a knowing glance. That’s all-important, because without Neeson’s full-throttle commitment — without that sweet sincerity that can turn on a dime into homicidal rage and transform that gentle, loping Brontosaurus of a man into a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex — there’s nothing there. He is the whole show.
That’s especially the case with “Taken 3.”
For those keeping score: In the first film, sex traffickers kidnapped the daughter (Maggie Grace) of former CIA agent Bryan Mills (Neeson) in Paris. And so he had to go there and kill everybody in Paris. Then in “Taken 2,” the same gang kidnapped his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) in Istanbul, and he had to depopulate Turkey.
So basically, at the end of the last movie, Bryan Mills had not only killed all his enemies but just about everybody who’d ever looked at him cross-eyed. Thus, the question was which way the series would go. Would they double down on absurdity and have a member of his family kidnapped again? Or would they take things in another direction? In “Taken 3” producer-screenwriter Luc Besson goes for the second option.
‘‘Taken 3” is the most conventional of the series, in that it breaks from the formula and adopts a more familiar action trope. This time Bryan is wanted for a crime he didn’t commit. And so as he is trying to find the real criminal, or real criminals, or some really vast criminal network, there is a cop (Forest Whitaker) trying to find him.
Starring: Liam Neeson, Dougray Scott, Forest Whitaker and Maggie Grace.
Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and for brief strong language.
This is slightly disappointing to all of us who hoped that Bryan might have had a cousin from Schenectady who got kidnapped — a special cousin who saved him from drowning in ye olde pond back in the day, and so this time it’s personal, etc. But I can’t blame Besson for trying something else, and it bodes well for the series that he did. In any case, “Taken 3” shows that it doesn’t need the formula — it needs Neeson — and as long as it provides contexts in which this loving Dad could be driven to waterboarding a guy, the screenwriters are doing their job.
However, there’s one thing from the previous “Takens” that the third installment absolutely should have retained, the foreign location. Here’s the problem. If he’s in Istanbul, he can practically level the city and then get on a plane and go home. But if he’s in Los Angeles, we know what he can get away with, and that’s not much. There’s a limit, and Bryan Mills should be without limits.
Along the same line, that he’s being chased by cops, specifically American cops, inhibits his destructive capacity. Wiping out hordes of Albanian drug dealers is one thing. Shooting a French police detective’s wife ("Taken") is just fine. No consequences. But with the L.A.P.D., one must be more circumspect. Again, carefulness is not a virtue we want Mr. Neeson or the character to cultivate.
One of the weirdest things in “Taken 3” is that the movie replaces, in the role of the ex-wife’s current husband, the more subtly objectionable Xander Berkeley with the overtly unwholesome Dougray Scott. It’s all part of the move from idiosyncrasy to convention, and in this case idiosyncrasy would have been better and more unexpected.
And here, it’s probably best I let you in on something. For the last several paragraphs, I’ve been trying to say something positive, but each time I find myself getting dragged, by honesty, into slightly negative territory. I suppose I’ve been trying to talk myself out of feeling disappointed about a movie I’d been looking forward to for six months.
But here’s something positive. This is a pretty good action movie with the added kick of Liam Neeson in the lead role. So there are moments of appalling good humor, which “Taken” fans thrive on. If you love the other “Taken” movies, you will like this. But if you’re determined to love it, you’ll have to talk yourself into it — and even then, it might not work.
First Published: January 10, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
