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

Read More

PLANE CRAZY

For the viewer who has thus far found the "Liam Neeson is a broken old man who kicks ass and pummels bad guys to stave off facing his inner demons" genre to be devoid of any real merit, Non-Stop provides no counter-argument (also, if a viewer could hold that belief in the wake of The Grey, no counter-argument is ever likely to change their mind, but I shouldn't digress when it's still the lede paragraph). It is not quite as whole-hearted generic as Unknown, the previous Neeson film directed by present helmer Jaume Collet-Serra, and this isn't an entirely good thing, since some of what gives Non-Stop its personality is addle-minded thematic nonsense. For the most part, though, if you want to see Neeson saying angry things into a phone have a tormented past involving a female relative, and hold a gun at somebody's face with an expression that veers between soul-dead killer and man with the weight of all the sins of the world pressing down on his shoulders, you know why you want to see that, Non-Stop knows why you want to see that, and it obliges.

That all being said, for a very long stretch, the film is much closer to the best of this very particular subgenre than the worst, as the films contents itself to be more of a thriller than an action film, with Collet-Serra, cinematographer Flavio Labiano, and production designer Alec Hammond conspiring to make the interior of Aqualantic Flight 10 among the most gloriously movie set-ish plane interiors in memory. It's bigger than it has any real reason to be, with considerably brighter, cleaner, and more colorful surfaces than any plane I have, myself, ever been on, but still cramped enough to sell the basic generic requirements of the piece. And the way that Collet-Serra and Labiano frame the wider shots lets us focus on the various extras to just the right degree that they slowly become familiar to us over the course of the hour and a half or so that we spend inside the plane, giving the impression that they're people and not just anthropomorphic props. And so, no matter how ridiculous or contrived the story gets - and it gets plenty ridiculous and contrived before it finally snaps in two, though even then I'm not sure that I would blame the contrivance so much as the half-baked philosophy - there's always a solidity to the proceedings: it doesn't take place in our reality, but it does take place in a reality, one that is consistent and very physical.

That makes for an awfully good thriller, at least to start; one that suggests filmmakers who studied Hitchcock, if not necessarily filmmakers who learned from him. The script presents a nice, basic scenario of a worn-down regular fella named Bill Marks (Neeson) who starts a day like any other with industrial quantities of alcohol and nicotine to get him on a plane, where he shall conduct his job of being a federal air marshal. Only this day, something is amiss, and somewhere between Canada and Iceland, Bill gets a message on a presumably secure line from someone demanding $150 million or they'll kill a passenger every 20 minutes. It's not just a whodunnit, it's a howdunnit: on a small, enclosed space, how could anybody know what they know, and how could they possibly hope to kill people? Not all of those questions are answered, or even addressed (a particularly rankling, though outrageously petty complaint: how did the killer know that Bill sneaked a cigarette in the washroom?), but the mechanics of it are all clever enough to keep things popping along, as Bill goes from paranoid to outright psychotic in trying to figure out which of the other persons onboard is responsible: the pleasant middle-aged lady (Julianne Moore, unfathomably overqualified) who made a big point of asking to sit next to Bill so she could have a window seat? The spectacularly irritable NYPD officer (Corey Stoll) who says unfortunate things about non-whites and gays? The nervous bespectacled guy (Scoot McNairy) who lied to Bill about his destination while they were still on the ground? The Arab doctor (Omar Metwally)? The other marshal (Shea Whigham)? The programmer (Nate Parker) who can make any smartphone do anything he wants? One of the flight attendants (Michelle Dockery and newly-minted Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o)? The little girl (Quinn McColgan) traveling alone for the first time. Tragically, it is not the little girl, which would have been just about the only twist Non-Stop needed to pull in order to make it my new favorite trashy thriller of the 21st Century.

While he's trying to unlock the mystery, Bill ends up on somebody's phone and from there to the internet, and from there a whole news story explodes based on what looks for all the world like an air marshal trying to hijack a plane to hold it for ransom. So there's an old-school wrong man thriller in all of that as well, which is maybe starting to get to be more content than the film can necessarily hold, and it also points out the big flaw in the whole edifice, which is that there are many points where the blackmailer's plot relies on people responding in a very specific way to an event, though that is by no means the only, and maybe not even the most rational, response they could have. For the most part, the film buzzes by fast enough that it doesn't always show up as something to notice, and by strictly taking place as a function of Bill's POV, the film keeps us unaware of the connecting tissues enough that by the time a plot hole manifests itself, we're miles past it. It can do nothing at all to combat the ultimate reveal of Who and Why, and the instant that we know the identity of the person who has been tormenting Bill all along, and what incoherent connection it has to 9/11 (the motivation reads as an attempt to simultaneously placate and indict both hard-right miltarists and hard-left peacniks, resulting in a person who believes exactly what the screenwriters require them to believe), that is the same instant at which Non-Stop ceases to be as interesting, not least because it's when Non-Stop fully stops being a thriller and fully commits to being an action film. And while, throughout, the movie has suffered from far too much editing, leaving nearly every scene a ragged collection of brutally short beats, it becomes actively unpleasant to watch when that editing is applied to the action scenes.

Still, we have at all points the steady North Star of Neeson, with his depressed, scruffy face and his barking irritability, and it remains true as it has all along that these films which would be wholly disposable in any other context get some degree of sincerity and gravity from the simple act of having a genuinely good actor playing the indestructible badass. Neeson has onscreen authority like few thriller stars of any generation, and whether the film is generally working, or generally failing, he still keeps it hanging together. It's still trash, undoubtedly, but trash with a certain spine to it, and a rugged kind of humanity that keeps poking in at the edges (and look, Julianne Moore ain't no acting slouch herself, so it's not The Liam Show and nothing but), giving it just a bit more heft than its wackadoo plotting should really permit.

6/10

Read More