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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 8/9/2025

Taken

The last time I had to fill a post in the middle of a longer run, I talked about Bill & Ted and the three films the two dudes, focusing on how the three movies establish, break, and then retreat into formula. With that recently in my mind and a new hole forming in the middle of another run, my mind turned to the Taken franchise, a quick trilogy of films that blew up and went away almost as quickly at the box office.

Largely the brainchild of French director, Luc Besson, who cowrote (with Robert Mark Kamen) and produced all three films, it started as just...an action movie. Originally mean to star Jeff Daniels, he cast Liam Neeson once Daniels dropped out of the production, and the tight, 90-minute story of a retired CIA agent jetting to Paris to undo a sex trafficking ring run by Albanian gangsters in order to save his daughter became a surprise hit.

Made for $25 million, it ended up making over $200 million at the worldwide box office. And where there is success in the movie industry, even if based in France through EuropaCorp., Besson's production company, there will be more attempts to capture it. So, Besson wrote and produced two more until the third one which...made over $300 million off of a relatively modest $48 million production budget.

That there haven't been more confounds me, but there was a television series (starring Clive Standen as the main character, Brian Mills) based on the idea that ran for two seasons, so maybe that's where the energy for the franchise died out.

Anyway, the franchise interests me more for artistic purposes than commercial, so let's talk about the logic of sequels.

Take 2

The first film in the franchise is a lot like the first John Wick film: a very simple premise of revenge that sees a retired, professional killer go on a rampage. I completely get this genre of movies. They're fun as we witness an accomplished, competent professional do a professional job with little extra business. Being 90 minutes long really helps things along as well because there's no time for side-business. They have one hour and thirty minutes to barrel through everything before the credits.

The second film can't do the same thing. Where the first film kept reminding me of John Wick (which came out later, admittedly, the same year as the third Taken film), the second film instantly reminded me of the Death Wish sequels. Charles Bronson keeps finding increasingly distant relatives and friends to kill a bunch of people over. Well, in the second, Brian Mills' family, including his ex-wife, decide to surprise him in Istanbul, a roughly 11-hour car ride from Albania, and Mills just...accepts it with a smile.

He goes on a date with his ex-wife, even, leaving Kim alone in the hotel. Nevermind that Kim ends up fine, the only way that danger happens is because Mills...just lets it happen despite a recent history of his daughter being kidnapped by Albanian gangsters who might not be that far away. So, why does this happen? So the movie can happen.

I think back to my admiration of the weird turn in direction that Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey took from the original film, killing the characters and having them go through the afterlife instead of having them do another report, wishing that Besson and Kamen had gone off in a weird direction. Having Mills be a worker in a sewer to make ends meet and then facing down a mysterious creature who steals his daughter through her bathtub, or something. Set it up quick, and get him moving fast. Instead, the second film's first act is interminably slow as it sets things up, in particular the effort to repair the relationship between Mills and his ex-wife Lenore (played by Famke Janssen).

However, there is cleverness in the script despite the tortured beginning. It's not Kim, the daughter, who gets taken. It's Mills and Lenore. Mills has to guide Kim to finding him, and we get that same flavor of tense, accelerated problem solving (without much action because Kim is a teenaged girl with no combat training) as she uses grenades to create sound and help direct her to him through his instruction. It's actually quite fun. The movie as a whole flounders a good bit in the first and third acts, but that second act is a take on the original material with a fun twist. Could they have done more around it? Sure, but I'm happy we got at least that much.

Take 3


I was surprised at the attempt to actually play with the formula established in the first film through the second film, but the third film tosses all of it aside. I don't mind that in general (think back to my imagined first sequel idea of Mills chasing a monster through the sewers), but the move is to the laziest of directions: loud action.

I'm not one to demand adherence to formula just for the sake of formula. I often advocate for active movements away from formula in sequels, but as I noted in my Bill & Ted post, that effort often ends up not being done well, and Taken 3 is a good example of that.

I think the key to understand is that the first two films are not action movies. The appeal is a professional man doing professional things to cut through chaos with a clear goal. The action is present, but it's mostly incidental (and also kind of pedestrian in execution). That's not what the third film is. It's Mills, again stupid in order to make the film happen, having to investigate a shadowy conspiracy around Lenore's death that involves her current husband, Shaun, and a Russian gangster.

The break from the first two films by not bringing in Albanian gangsters again is fine. The change in genre, from action-thriller to outright action, could be fine. The movement to a shadowy conspiracy that Mills needs to unravel instead of just cut through could be fine. And yet, it ends up just noise. You have to cancel out who Mills is, again, just to get the film to start, including retconning stuff from the first film (he did a deep background check on Stuart that didn't pick up that he did business with a known gun runner?), and the investigation gets sidetracked for long stretches in favor of middling action sequences, the problem being that Mills often doesn't have a clear goal of why he's there. He's being chased instead of chasing, making him reactive instead of active.

And the appeal of the first film, in particular, is just lost. There's no clear goal. The main character gets sidetracked and pulled back and forth without agency. The action is prioritized over professional effort. I just found it a loud, confused mess.

Legacy


So it doesn't surprise me that Besson moved the property to television. With these kinds of stories, you're looking for just continuing adventures of a character where nothing really changes in him from one to the next. It also allows for more adherence to formula by taking the procedural route (I've never watched an episode, but the episode summaries I've read indicate an overarching story over 10 episodes where repetition of story beats within episodes is the norm).

The film trilogy, though, will always be primarily known for two things: the first film as a whole and the over-done editing (about 17 cuts) to get Liam Neeson over a fence in the third film.

The sequels have their fans, but the IMDb ratings say everything, I think. The first one has a 7.7/10. That's high. That's actually, really high. The second has an IMDb rating of 6.2. The third has an IMDb rating of 6.0.

Larger Lessons


Is there a larger lesson to learn from this? It might just be that sometimes sequels aren't necessary. We want more Taken, but more Taken is going to struggle to be like Taken but different. What if Luc Besson had gone from the success of the first film and made something else...new with Liam Neeson? Similar in look and feel but not hidebound by formula from the first film? Another adventure with a new character played by Neeson that treads on similar grounds?

I think back to the period after the release of Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead when no one knew what would be coming next. There were rumors of a direct sequel titled From Dusk 'til Shaun which would have the same character go into a vampire movie. I mean, it would have been a real break from the zombies of the first, but Wright and Simon Pegg decided to go ever more afield than that, making Hot Fuzz, a Michael Bay/Midsomer Murders parody/celebration, instead, and it's generally as beloved, if not more so, than the first film.

But, that's not a lesson Hollywood wants to learn. IP is king. Remember, the Taken sequels made more money than the first one, and that's ultimately all that matters because cashflow is vital to keeping these studios alive. Selling Taken 2 to audiences is a safer financial bet than selling Liam Neeson Does the same thing but slightly different with a different title would.

I just think a Luc Besson written adventure dealing with a new character played by Liam Neeson doing similar things but not dedicated to the formula and lore of the first Taken film might have been more entertaining.

Ironically, I think that the only people to actually understand this are the people who are bringing us the reboot for The Naked Gun, starring Neeson, that obviously plays on the image he's curated over the past 17 years as an action star. No idea if it'll be funny or good or anything, but the marketing on the film is obviously leaning into that idea of him as an action star and just putting silly stuff around it. It's honestly more interesting than anything I saw in the two Taken sequels.

A Note

I'm still in Europe. It is very late. There is no automatic scheduling in the blog software. I will probably not be commenting, just staying up late enough, with the help of the movies I downloaded into my phone (Stoker, for instance), until 1:45 in the morning, to hit the publish button.

Be good.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Weapons

Freakier Friday

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Taken (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Not great cinema, but a solid entertainment." [Personal Collection]

Taken 2 (Rating 2/4) Full Review "The second act is shockingly solid, but the first act is boring and the third act hinges on emotional catharsis that neither makes sense nor the movie properly sets up." [Library]

Taken 3 (Rating 1/4) Full Review "It's just kind of a miserable third entry in a franchise that probably never should have existed beyond the first one. Not a surprise." [The Criterion Channel]

The Young Stranger (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It doesn't surprise me that no one searches out Frankenheimer's first film, a small family drama he made in the middle of his television career before Birdman of Alcatraz with no movie stars and not at all genre related. But, I think that should be fixed." [YouTube]

Impossible Object (Rating 1/4) Full Review "Really, the only way this makes sense to me is if Frankenheimer was intending a psychedelic or phantasmagoric journey into madness, and it's obviously not what the film is. What it is ends up being…kind of just boring." [Library]

French Connection II (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, the overall package is kind of weird. There isn't much of an overall package. It's too many different parts that don't gel together, but some of the individual parts have their charms from the innocent (Doyle trying to order whiskey at a bar) to the explosive (the shootouts). It's not a disaster, but it's not really good either." [Library]

Black Sunday (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It was about the thrills. He built up to the thrills, as inelegantly as he did, delivered the thrills, and exited stage right. I can't fault him for that." [Library]

Prophecy (Rating 1/4) Full Review "Frankenheimer wanted his own Jaws. He didn't get it." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 8/30, and it will be about the directing career of John Frankenheimer.