Tak3n

Before properly reviewing Tak3n it's worth describing the screening conditions as they were out of the ordinary for my cinema experiences. As I walked towards the cinema some woman waiting for a bus yelled at me about not touching my penis in public, and I believe this is sound advice that deserves to be shared. Inside the cinema, things didn't improve as Event Cinemas on Tak3n's opening weekend were only screening the movie in Vmax (larger screen, better audio, better seats, higher ticket prices), but the version shown was the standard format resulting in giant black bars surrounding the screen and only two-channel audio. To add injury to insults, one bloke two rows behind me attempted to start a fist-fight with the bloke seated directly behind me twenty minutes into the film. An argument ensued, other punters yelling for the instigator to "Fuck right off!" and the instigator's girlfriend was presumably pronounced DOA on the way to hospital from the shame and embarrassment of a packed house angrily staring at her and her dickhead boyfriend. While these kinds of conditions could obviously poison my experience I've attempted to remain as objective as possible.

                                                 "She's going to the bathroom."
                                                           "Call for back-up!"

There is a moment in Tak3n where Liam Neeson as the gravelly-voiced, obsessive death-machine Bryan Mills escapes from police by hiding in the sewers of suburban Los Angeles. As he sits there, trapped within a literal river of shit, art imitates life as Neeson reflects on what his career has become. From Oscar Schindler to a 60-year old action-man who has penthouse shoot-outs with bland Russian villains in their underwear. In 2009, Pierre Morel (District B13: Ultimatum, From Paris With Love, The Gunman) directed Taken, a simple story of a retired CIA agent rescuing his teen-aged daughter from Albanian sex traffickers in Paris by murdering EVERYONE. It's popularity and success can be attributed to the one memorable moment of the film, the infamous phone call involving Liam Neeson's cold threat. Most everything outside of this moment is mis-remembered, the action is average at best, the conclusion passable but undeniably lackluster, and minimal character development resulting in a one-note slog of "American man kills foreigners in their own country because they're inherently evil.". Luc Besson (director of The Fifth Element, Leon the Professional and Lucy) co-wrote the script with Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote all of the Transporter movies, The Fifth Element, a lot of the Karate Kid movies, and the pair wrote Taken's two sequels. Taken is an okay film, but its sequel, helmed by Colombiana and Transporter 2 director Oliver Megaton is a power-play of lazy writing, seizure-inducing editing (1:02-1:09) and the "Sequel Cash-grab" (see Hangover 2), where the only difference between Taken and Taken 2 was the setting and the amount of people who were taken. Taken 2 is a steaming pile of shit, but the success of this franchise and Neeson's recent star-power as "angry, fighty, middle-aged man" proved to be a sure-fire path to decent box office earnings.

Tak3n takes places in L.A two years after the events in Istanbul. Brian Mills (Neeson) spends his days obsessing over his young daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and slowly re-connecting with his ex-wife Lenore. That is until she is killed and he is framed for the murder. Lead FBI agent Frank Dotzler (Forest Whitaker) takes charge in the pursuit of Mills, but in the course of his investigation becomes aware of Mills' history and capabilities. This doesn't prevent Dotzler from keeping a close eye on Kim, who he knows is Mills' greatest priority and weakness, and Lenore's husband Stuart (Dougray Scott), a businessman who's relationship with Lenore was deteriorating before her death. Meanwhile, a group of mysterious and deadly mercenaries appear to be following Mills and his family.

In this scene, Brian Mills poisons his daughters yoghurt drink so she'll feel nauseous and leave her university lecture and go to the bathroom. When she enters the very women's toilet he is hiding in, he grabs her and forces her into a stall. Between this and her mum's murder for which he is the prime suspect, Kim is remarkably resilient and doesn't at all act like this is the creepiest fucking thing ever.

To borrow a phrase from BBC's The Thick of It, Tak3n is an omni-shambles, a complete fuck-up of purpose and execution from top to bottom, a movie almost offensively bad and artless. Taken 2 was one of the worst movies of 2012 with it's premise worthy of all the mockery it received, some of the shakiest and incoherent action ever recorded, and a clunky, worthless ending that contradicts itself. But there are moments where Neeson at least appears to give a damn, though as he says in the final scene "I am tired of it all." So when this new mess begins, Neeson grits his teeth and grunts his way through scenes, devoid of any personality or real emotion. It's amazing the world of difference between his performances in the Taken movies and other recent movies like The Grey or even a Walk Among the Tombstones, both films where he plays a comparably dark and grunty character, but with actual humanity and vulnerability. He's not alone in this endeavour, Famke Janssen just blunders her way through her lines, lacking any subtlety or depth as she desperately rushes to finish her lines and fuck off from the movie. Dougray Scott hams it up a bit in his bid to pretend that the audience will not realise he's replacing Xander Berekely and that he totally isn't the villain (SPOILER ALERT: he's Dougray Scott, of course he's the villain). Frankly, Scott was much better in the much more enjoyable Mission Impossible 2, a similarly shit sequel. Though some joy can be derived from his interactions with Neeson as he is much better at hiding his native Scottish accent than Neeson is with his Irish accent. Maggie Grace appears depressed she's still playing a 30-year old teenager and that's the only work she seems to be getting. Forest Whitaker does his best impersonation of Lawrence Fishburne's career recently, in just playing the fat, black guy who is in charge, though someone obviously told him his character needs a quirk so he carries around a chess piece for no conceivable reaosn, unless he thinks he's actually in Inception.

In typical Tak3n style, the action is fast and fucked-in-the-head. Most fights appear as a flurry of black leather before a cutaway of someone falling out of a car, a bottle hitting the ground or a gun sliding away. With the excellent staging of action scenes in films like The Raid, John Wick, The World's End, Why Don't You Play in Hell?, or even  A Walk Among the Tombstones, Tak3n blatantly and bizarrely exists on the side of The Expendables 3, which also lacks any talent or idea of how to present action well. Even outside of the fights, the filmmakers lack the basic ideology behind editing or cinematography as a foot-chase through suburban backyards devolves into the cinematic equivalent of being stuck in a tumble dryer as no less than a dozen cuts can convey Nesson vaulting onto and climbing over a chain-link fence. Comparable to the fucking mess that is the action cinematography is the script, which comes across as a translation from French by a deaf man who converts it into feudal Japanese and then finally into English. Lenore's dialogue is so painfully on the nose, and Stuart's methods and motivations are dismally at odds with the committed family-man he was portrayed as in the previous movies. Dialogue such as the convenience store cashier describing Kim Mills' habits to Dotzler ("She gets the same thing everyday, peach yoghurt drink. I feel bad for the girl. She drank it right there out of the refrigerator. She must've been thirsty.") or Dotzler getting a record of Kim's movements from the FBI agent trailing her (FBI "She's gone to the bathroom." Dotzler: "Call for backup! Now!") will  result in repeated and deserved mocking of the script of Besson and Kamen. There's even a moment where Mills' car is run off the road and over a cliff, and when he confronts the perpetrators five minutes later, he asks "You wanna know how I escaped the car crash" before a 3-second blur of cars crashing and a cutaway of him falling out and hiding next to a rock, because just putting the words "FUCK YOU, HE ESCAPED" in giant letters on-screen at this moment didn't test well.

Tak3n is a perfect example of franchise fatigue, an idea which should have died in 2009 limps on because the internet was stupid enough to immortalise one single moment, as it always does. Oliver Megaton is almost as bad a director as Besson is a writer, and the on-going trend of dark and gritty Neeson is absolutely past any acceptable limit. As a stand-alone movie, this isn't all that bad, but as one of 2015's first major releases, and the second sequel in an action franchise, it's fucking insulting. 2015 shouldn't start off with something like this taking money away from films like Birdman or the Imitation Game, but Tak3n absolutely reiterates the cineamtic creed of "Fuck you, it's January."