A MAN WITH A VERY WORN-OUT SET OF SKILLS

It is called Taken 3. Not Tak3n. I can't express how disappointed that fact makes me, and if I were able to, it would probably just make you suspect that I had some severe emotional problems.

So anyway, the grand finale that isn't to a trilogy that wasn't supposed to be, and who among us can even feign surprise that the film's not any damn good at all. I expect the debates to rage among the Taken faithful for ages, assuming they haven't already taken place and fizzled out over the weekend,* whether Taken 3, is, on balance, a better or worse sequel than Taken 2; the new film is certainly the more incompetently made and horribly written, with less obvious justification for the story it's telling to have ever come into existence, but it's also so puckish about being awful that it's a lot less boring. I've honestly thought more about whether the film crosses the "so bad that it's good" line than anything else about it; on the one hand, a car chase scene botched so badly that I was struck with an intense yawning fit right in the middle of it. On the other, the sullen line "I got the bagels", which in context is the funniest sentence delivered by Liam Neeson in the entirety of his career.

Letting that issue sit to the side for a bit, what is this thing called Taken 3? Some little time after Taken and Taken 2, ex-CIA superbadass Bryan Mills (Neeson) is living a more quiet existence in Los Angeles being a good dad to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace, who is just too damn old to be playing a college student at this point if they're not going to make a joke about it), and a friend to his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), especially the kind of friend who looks deep into your eyes as you tell him all the problems you're having with your second husband Stuart (Dougray Scott, taking over a role originated by Xander Berkeley). There are points where, I swear to God, Taken 3 stops everything cold to walk through the details of a sad divorced man's daydreams for minutes at a time. It's a perfect life, right up to the time that Lenore is killed in Bryan's apartment and the LAPD, in the form of Frank Dotzler (Forest Whitaker) starts to hunt for him. But as we have learned twice over, Bryan Mills cannot be caught by any mortal, and the only added difficulty for him this time around is that his opponents are all Americans and thus too precious to be mowed through as indiscriminately as the various foreigners in the first two pictures. Luckily for his sanity, the film eventually unloads a crate of Tattooed Russian Mobsters, so the body count can start ramping up.

It already beggared belief to have another kidnapping situation form the spine of Taken 2 in the wake of Taken 1, so it's at least worth being grateful that the film didn't try to shoehorn another one of those in. But it does raise the question of why, with so many "Liam Neeson shouts, kills" movies these days, this needed to be a Taken at all; all that really does is saddle the movie with a bunch of characters it has to try to pretend to care about, as though anyone has ever watched any of these movies because they're so invested in Grace's performance of a well-layered character. I'd say that having the Taken branding is the only thing that disguises the degree to which Taken 3 is an uncredited remake of The Fugitive, but let's not get carried away. It doesn't disguise that fact at all. There's even a more-or-less exact analogue to the "I didn't kill my wife!"/"I don't care!" scene, though it doesn't come at the same time as the more-or-less exact analogue to the escape-through-a-drain-system scene.

Just about the only thing it doesn't borrow from The Fugitive, actually, is the tense raw-nerve psychology of that film's cop and hunted man. Neeson and Whitaker are both old pros at breathing life into shaky characters buried in crap scripts, but Taken 3 strands them both beyond even their ability to resurrect anything. Whitaker is particularly burdened with some unfortunate business involving an unexplained wooden chess piece that he rolls around - in extreme, dramatic close-up, no less - and a proclivity for eating evidence. Also, some of the worst lines in a screenplay not unduly burdened with literacy (the very worst of which also involves bagels). Neeson just looks tired and old, and the way he processes the action movie shenanigans of the piece carries with it a certain wheezy impatience, like the "grizzled action badass" phase of his career stopped being fun, and when the hell is Scorsese going to get that movie about the priests into production, anyway?

Or it could just be that being in Taken 3 would depress anybody. The whole thing is a klutzy lattice of inscrutable jerry-rigged plotting, which makes things complicated that needn't be, and which are anyway all blinds on the way towards the patently obvious shocker moment two-thirds in. And the action is just pure, unmitigated shit: the first major chase sequence, a footrace through L.A. (doing a poor job of replacing the more picturesque locations of the first two movies) is maddeningly choppy, stretching even the simplest action - Bryan scrambling over a six-foot fence, for example - into more individual cuts than you can possibly imagine. It took goddamn five shots to get Neeson and his stunt double over that fence. All it does is reduce the clarity of the action to nil, just incoherent flashes of movement that don't connect to the equally-incoherent flashes immediately before or following, adding no sense of momentum, since without any kind of linear context, momentum is a meaningless concept. I haven't been so viscerally angry at the cutting in an action setpiece since the opening of Quantum of Solace. The worst part of all, is that this isn't even the worst action scene in the movie: the car chase scene is even harder to make sense of, and it's sluggish on top of it. By the time a totally uninteresting but basically legible fight in a liquor store comes around, it feels like the second coming of John Woo.

All of this noisy, indecipherable nonsense and floppy, dismally uninteresting character drama that the film parades around as though it were even remotely possible to care about it - the dead ex-wife & mother is only really an issue for the characters in the scenes where she is discovered and buried - is brought to us by the gentle hand of producer & co-writer Luc Besson's worst stock company director, Oliver Megaton. Mr. Megaton was not born under that name; he adopted it as a nom de cinéma owing to the fact he was born on the 20th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshma. That's only a matter of trivia, and it's not the first time I've mentioned it on this blog. But if I tell you that Taken 3 feels in every way exactly like a movie made by a man who would take that name, for that reason, I trust you will understand what I mean.

2/10

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THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS

To begin with, Lucy is dumb as all hell. It's quite impossible to lose sight of that fact. It's easily the dumbest movie of the summer of 2014, and there was a Transformers picture and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in the running for that title, so y'know, it's not a little achievement.

If Lucy is somehow still more palatable than those are - and I think it is, but I haven't the slightest inclination towards changing the minds of anyone who thinks otherwise, because I'm very likely wrong - it's thanks in no small part to writer-director Luc Besson's very unique relationship to dumb cinema. Besson was, as we all recall from spending the '80s in France, one of the key figures in the Cinéma du Look movement, a theoretical development in youth-oriented filmmaking that privileged the immediacy of style over any kind of depth of psychology or narrative, providing an emphatic sensory experience built around the disenfranchised youth of '80s France with more spectacle than sociology. I am frankly a bit skeptical of the whole conceit, given that the three main figures in the movement - Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix, and Leos Carax - are comparable only in that the French critical establishment disliked all of them very much. But that being said, Besson's work especially has always had a tang of le Look to it: a deranged, candy-coated explosion of movement, color, and bodies that exists mostly as a sensual singularity without any strong attempt to extrapolate meaning beyond "feel things in this moment".

Lucy is definitely candy, if it's anything: it feels like the cinematic equivalent of dumping a dozen Pixy Stix into a an extra-large Coke and guzzling the whole thing down in one go. First you get the manic energy, then you get the feeling that your whole head is vibrated, and at last you're worn out and a touch nauseated. But it's fun while it lasts, and it's kept aloft by the sheer brassiness and creativity of its stupidity. For the first 15 minutes, as Lucy establishes its titular heroine (played by Scarlett Johansson in a popcorn variation on her Under the Skin role), surrounded by untrustworthy sorts creeping up on her from all corners, Besson throws in non-diegetic cutaways to antelopes being stalked by cheetahs (all while Johansson is wearing a leopard-print jacket, mind you), in a hopelessly silly gesture that's too clever to to hate, while being impossible to take seriously. And while Lucy certainly projects a desire to be taken seriously, with its stoned undergraduate take on human evolution and biology, Besson treats these subjects with such facile inattention (it plows through a 2001-esque "dawn of man" scene in about 10 seconds) that even the most heavy philosophical conceits recedes into the same buzzy rush of colors and momentum as the action sequences.

Not that it matters, anyway, but the plot involves Lucy being forcibly turned into a mule by a Taiwan druglord who sews a new drug into her abdomen; one beating later, the bag has split and given her an overdose of a growth hormone that causes her brain to kick into evolutionary overdrive. And so she begins to have access to more and more of her brain's carrying power - it's a whole movie based on that hoary "10% of your brain" legend, and too insistent about that as its gimmick to write if off as a generic "supersmart!" fantasy on the order of 2011's Limitless. No, it's married to its absurd pseudoscience, and one of the biggest problems with the film is that it slows down, surprisingly often, for expository monologues (themselves spiked by a random array of stock footage cut at the speed of light) by Morgan Freeman in the thankless role of a movie scientist, the kind specialising in all of human knowledge; and for a film that lives and dies on the strength of its gonzo commitment to showing Lucy gaining all sorts of random telekinetic and energy-altering superpowers, and applying them in glossy, aggressively Cool setpieces, any and all slowdowns are deadly.

When it works, Lucy is entirely dependent on Johansson, whose demerits as an actress both perceived and actual are precisely what the role needs: as she becomes more of an energy being and less human, Lucy is represented as increasingly divorced from emotions or personality or comprehensible internal psychology, and Johansson is good at projecting that kind of shell without a detectable inner life. Which sounds like it can't possibly be a compliment, but it's exactly what the film wants, and insofar as Lucy is pleasurable at all, it's pleasurable because it openly asks us to consider only its surfaces, and never its confused, scientifically illiterate, socially irresponsible undercurrents. Hell, part of me wonders if the point of the nutsoid script isn't to specifically discourage the viewer from engaging with it on any level but that of style and awareness of moving bodies and moving bullets.

This kind of actively shallow filmmaking, close to the platonic ideal of Besson's filmography in its admiration for speed and violence playing out in Europe and perpetrated by gorgeous white women, manages to be entertaining in fits and starts for basically only two reasons. One is that, at 90 minutes, Lucy doesn't succumb to the so very common sin of indulging itself for any longer than it can tolerate (one imagines a version of the film ten minutes shorter, shorn of the scientific gobbledygook, but we can't have everything). The other is that Besson is distinctly good at creating individual moments of viscerally appealing action, color, and shape; the film nears its finale with a bizarre, helplessly pretentious scene in which Lucy finds herself blasting through time and space as her body turns jet black in a featureless white room, and what puts it over is not that it's dramatically sound - Christ know it's not - but that the combination of Eric Serra's feverish score, Thierry Arbogast's chrome-like, saturated cinematography, and Besson's own high-speed, but never incoherent editing push it into a kind of blissful, coked-up place where the basic texture of the images is itself rewarding and pleasurable.

It's still more frenetic than anything else, and for all the immediate rush that comes while watching it, it's an excruciatingly hard movie to retain any sense of when it's down. It's basically a film about the marvels of taking drugs that functions as a drug in its own right; it creates manic visions and when it's done you're a little groggy and resent yourself a bit. But its absurdly slick, wholly surface-level appeal is hard to deny, and at least it has the benefit of being unapologetically in love with itself as a piece of cinema.

6/10

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A MAN WITH A VERY GENERIC SET OF SKILLS

Ask me three months ago, and I'd have said it was no surprise at all that Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit would be the best action movie starring Kevin Costner to be released in the first quarter of 2014. Ask me right after I saw Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and I'd have said it was a goddamn impossibility. But here we are, and 3 Days to Kill exists, and boy is it ever a piece of shit.

As produced by Luc Besson's Parisian Thriller & Growling Papa Bear factory, it comes as little surprise to find that 3DtK features Costner as a spy with an ex-wife and a resentful teenage daughter, presently living in the City of Lights, under the never-clarified presumption that the ex is herself French, even though she kind of reads as American; she is, luckily, played by Connie Nielsen, the patron saint of people who are presumably European despite reading as American. The daughter is played by Hailee Steinfeld, whose post-Oscar nomination career is not going the way I imagine that she hoped for. In this particular instance, the spy is suffering from brain cancer that has metastasized into his lungs, and the prognosis is three to five months, though based on the coughing, the frequent blackouts, and the bloody noses, one gets the impression that his doctor was being kind. He - and to give him his right name, so we don't keep getting bogged down in pronouns, it's Ethan Renner - has quit working for the CIA in the wake of an epically botched attempt to capture an arms dealer and his hatchet man, respectively The Wolf (Richard Sammel) and The Albino (Tómas Lemarquis), and hopes to reconnect with the only people he ever loved before fucking it all up. But no sooner does he arrive in Paris than the CIA finds him, in the form of a sexy lady agent whose name is not an anagram of Satan only because even Luc Besson has heard of restraint. Played by Amber Heard with the sexual sophistication of a Nazi Panzerdivision, Vivi Delay is pitched as a literal devil figure (in one scene, she's standing in a featureless room bathed in blood red lighting), demanding that Ethan continue his quest to take down The Wolf and The Albino despite promising his ex, Christine, that he's done with that life. In exchange, Vivi can offer him a life-saving drug to allow him more time spent with his newly rebuilding family. So it turns out to be, as God is my witness, an adaptation of the Faust legend. Produced and co-written by Luc Besson. Starring Kevin Costner as a CIA agent. Truly, we live in blessed times.

The problem with 3DtK, or the creative genius, if you're of a mind to go there, is that it wants to be three genres all at once, but it only really has space for two. There is, most obviously, the traditional "super-tough badass storming through a European capital and punching righteousness right into a colorful assortment of ethnics" movie on the model of Taken; there is, only somewhat unexpectedly, a comically over-the-top parody of the same, with situations and characters too absurd to take as serious; there is also, dubiously, a sober family drama about a man trying desperately to regain his dignity and honor as a member of a functioning family even as The Life tries to pull him back in, in the form of Heard trying to eye-fuck him into a coma.

No, hold on, the problem isn't that the film has all of these things going on at once, the problem is that regardless of how many genres the script is trying to mash together in some kind of Gallic fantasia of guns and manly tears, director McG is only remotely interested in one of them, and so even when the film is attempting to serious and engaged with the central family dynamic - even moreso when it's at its most frivolously comic-seeming - he insistently manhandles it into the glowering action tones that can be mustered, despite the action movie leg of the film being, perhaps surprisingly, the least prominent of the three (frequently inserted with particularly crude abandon; there is a set piece in a delicatessen which ramps up so arbitrarily and suddenly that I legitimately thought that it was a dream sequence at first).

Even without being directed with no sense of proportion or finesse, there's plenty of idiotic dross in the script: a family of African squatters hiding in Ethan's Paris flat show up for no reason other than provide some immensely strained parallel narrative of fatherhood (something done to much greater effect anyway with a Serbian limo service operator played by Marc Andréoni, whose frequent beatings at Ethan's hands are always the occasion for some subsequent fatherly wisdom - this is the one part of the film where the comic underlayment manages to poke through enough that it's actually funny), insert not just one but a whole family of Magical Negroes into the action, and facilitate some remarkably self-loathing jokes about the French bureaucracy; there's an interlude at a tattoo parlor that serves no narrative function and plays like a scene from the straight people version of Cruising. And every time Agent Satan shows up, the film screams to an abrupt halt, puking and moaning, though how much of that is the character and how she's worked into the story, and how much is Heard's unfathomably bad performance, it's hard to say.

Some fringes of life try to force themselves out: Costner's gruff, craggy "lung cancer" voice sounds not unlike Christian Bale's Batman doing an impression of Walter Matthau, and his relentlessly sullen body language veers straight into So Bad It's Good territory, but at least that helps us see the outline of the warped dark farce that a better version of 3 Days to Kill might have been. Steinfeld tries real damn hard to put over a character who is half-prop and half-contrivance, recognising maybe that she only has so many chances to make an impression before she ends up in whatever dank hole claimed Saoirse Ronan's career. Some of the action scenes are good: the opening sequence especially, depicting a CIA sting gone bad, is well-choreographed, and feels like it takes place in a physical world where there are consequences to actions, something that absolutely does not happen again later, as Ethan chases his targets around in one of the most sleepily-edited car chase scenes in modern memory, where things are destroyed less to cause an impact and more to wake the viewer up.

It really is, all told, a truly dismal experience, a cold fish of a movie whose sense of comedy and energy are both suggest by its heavy reliance on the rousing chorus of synthpop anthem "I Love It" as a repeated, nominally humorous beats (it's Ethan's ringtone - takes too long to explain it). All in all, the film fails so completely on every one of the disparate levels it's trying to land on, and ends up being so much of a wandering, ill-tempered slog that even calling it a big dumb action movie promises something vastly more entertaining and pleasantly frivolous than we get.

2/10

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