Remember The A-Team (the one with George Peppard and Mr T)? Remember those scenes in which one (or more) of the intrepid titular outlaws would gun down a helicopter, which, in turn, would explode into smithereens against a conveniently located cliff? Cut to all the helicopter's occupants staggering around the wreckage, clutching their heads as if in the throes of a not particularly severe hangover.
Taken 3 is guaranteed to trigger such Proustian rushes. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the presence of Liam Neeson, who appears both here and in the unlovely 2010 A-Team reboot, a film that has been ruthlessly excised from the collective memory. It's just that Taken 3 has come up with an unwaveringly 12A-friendly wheeze: no matter how high the body count climbs, nobody really gets hurt.
Sure, bad guys stumble and react to the minor explosive charges that normally signal a movie bullet. Then they neatly and bloodlessly swoon backwards, thereby allowing Neeson to get a clearer shot at his next victim.
In a crucial plot development, Famke Janssen, playing Neeson’s ex-wife, is brutally murdered in her own home. Cut to: a dainty mark, possibly pencilled in with spit on a fading pink marker, across her neck.
Oh, the humanity.
We shouldn’t be too cavalier. To date, world audiences have forked out $603 million to watch Neeson’s murkily defined operative Bryan Mills rescue his daughter (Maggie Grace) over and over. But this time it’s personal. More personal. Well, about the same actually.
Having been framed for the marker graffiti on his ex-wife, it falls to Bryan to evade the cops (led by Forest Whitaker’s Columbo-like inspector), kill off cartoon Russian mobsters and find the real killer.
Let the gunplay begin.
Director Olivier Megaton (he of Transporter 3 and Taken 2) puts on a workman-like display. Neeson puts in an equally workman-like performance. Flashbacks are included for audience members too dumb to recall what happened 20 minutes ago or too dumb to follow the plot (Ballymena man shoots stuff).
Fans of the first two films will be cheered by the efficiency of the product. Non-fans need not trouble themselves.
