Review: TAKEN 3

TAKEN 3  (ACTION/THRILLER)
1.5 out of 4 stars
Directed by Olivier Megaton
Starring: Liam Neeson, Forest Whitaker, Maggie Grace, Dougray Scott, Famke Janssen, Sam Spruell, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, Jonny Weston
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and for brief strong language.
109 minutes
Verdict: Lazily written and poorly acted with the exception of a very welcome Forest Whitaker, TAKEN 3 is ill-conceived and in poor taste with little to offer as entertainment.
YOU MAY ENJOY TAKEN 3 IF YOU LIKED:
TAKEN  (2008)
TAKEN 2  (2012)
THE TRANSPORTER  (2002) 
TRANSPORTER 3  (2008)
COLOMBIANA  (2011)

Let's face it, Bryan Mills is no John McClane.  Bryan Mills is a stupid man who's lucky that he lives in a stupid world, otherwise he wouldn't get away with being so unintelligent.  He happens to be very good at talking on the phone though.
In the second sequel to the surprise 2008 smash-hit, TAKEN, Mills (Liam Neeson), a nondescript ex-government operative with a specific set of skills, is framed for the murder of his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), and forced to go on the run.  Meanwhile, he works to protect his daughter (Maggie Grace) from the killers that are still out there and solve the mystery, while Franck Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), a police inspector is driven to catch him (THE FUGITIVE much?).  In the process of proving that he didn't kill his wife, Mills goes on a comical crime spree with thousands of dollars in destruction and more than a few lives, killing people (it's okay, mostly just Eastern Europeans), beating the living hell out of police officers, blowing stuff up.  Sometimes it's a little tough to tell who the real bad guy is.
Liam Neeson is an excellent actor, but he's just phoning it in here (so to speak).  Not that he sounded particularly American in the earlier installments, but he's not even bothering to not sound Irish this time, and one has to wonder how much of the action Neeson is doing himself, given the severely over-edited nature of the action scenes.  Not a bad deal for him though; for as little as he does, he gets a handsome $20 million of the $48 million budget.  Maggie Grace, as his daughter, is reliably irritating, and I do wish her dad would stop saving her.
As the inspector tasked with bringing Mills in, Forest Whitaker is the only pleasant part of a pretty unpleasant film.  His role is not a very active one, but he seems to at least have an interest in what he's doing, giving an interesting and gently humorous performance.
No one is well-served by the script, written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, which is comically lazy at times.  Who has time to explain how Mills survived an obviously fatal explosion, when everyone knows that no matter how silly the explanation, the point is that he survived?  It's not even consistent at that though, when there are lengthy, unintentionally humorous stretches of exposition.  Everything rings false, and in the rare case that there's some attempt to convey emotion, it is in the most ham-fisted way possible, with thuddingly obvious musical cues.
It's a movie in poor taste like its predecessors, a brain-dead white man's revenge-fantasy for all those guys who can see the bright side of something terrible happening to their family as being an excuse to go on a rampage.  Worse, it's dull in practically every way.