'Taken 3' a likable, not lovable, action movie.

AuthorLaSalle, Mick
PositionLiving

Byline: Mick LaSalle

'Taken 3'

1/2

A 20th Century Fox film

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and for brief strong language

Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

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? (I was hoping for that for months.) Or would they take things in another direction? In "Taken 3'' producer-screenwriter Luc Besson goes for the second option.

"Taken 3'' -- which was hidden from critics until it was too late for reviews to make the Friday papers -- 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.

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...

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