WISE Score
Avg. Tomatometer
Liam Neeson has a very particular set of skills, but apparently, finding a good script for the third time wasn't one of them.
13%
13%View →Taken 3 is the cinematic equivalent of a lukewarm burger from a fast-food chain you usually like. It’s technically edible, but you’ll regret the choice almost immediately.
By this point, the franchise has lost all the lean, mean energy that made the original a hit. It’s repetitive, the action is borderline unwatchable due to the frantic editing, and the plot is a mess. Unless your teen is a Liam Neeson completist, there are dozens of better thrillers to spend two hours on.
Technically fine for 13-year-olds who are used to Marvel-level violence, but honestly, it's so boring and poorly made that most kids will check their phones halfway through.
While the core is a father's devotion to his daughter, the 'particular set of skills' involves a trail of bodies and total disregard for law and order. It's a revenge fantasy, not a character study.
This is a paint-by-numbers sequel that recycled the tired tropes of the first two films. The action is edited so frantically you can barely tell what's happening, which isn't 'creative'—it's just messy.
It's a standard PG-13 action flick. Unlike the first movie, it avoids the darker human trafficking themes, but it's still constant gunfire, car chases, and neck-snapping. No surprise nudity, just a lot of noise.
There's almost zero nutritional value here. It's cinematic junk food that's gone a bit stale. You won't walk away with new insights into the human condition, just a slight ringing in your ears.
The original Taken worked because it was a lean, 90-minute blast of adrenaline that reinvented Liam Neeson as an aging wrecking ball. It had a simple, terrifying stakes-raiser: a daughter kidnapped in a foreign country. By the time we get to Taken 3, the franchise has completely run out of gas, opting for a convoluted "wrongly accused" plot that feels more like a generic police procedural than a high-stakes thriller.
If you’ve heard anything about this movie, it’s probably the fence. There is a now-infamous sequence where Bryan Mills climbs a chain-link fence, and the film uses roughly 15 cuts to show a five-second action. This isn't just a nerd nitpick; it’s the defining characteristic of the film. The "shaky cam" style is dialed up to such an extreme that it becomes physically tiring to watch.
For a generation of kids raised on the smooth, long-take choreography of John Wick or the clear physical comedy of Jackie Chan, this style of filmmaking feels dated and cheap. If your teen is sensitive to motion sickness or just appreciates seeing how a fight actually unfolds, they’re going to find the visual language here frustrating. It’s action cinema that tries to hide its lack of energy with rapid-fire editing.
One weird quirk of this sequel is that it’s actually more "family-friendly" in its themes than the first one, even if the quality is lower. The original movie dealt with the grim reality of sex trafficking, which made for a very dark, uncomfortable viewing experience for younger teens. Taken 3 pivots to a standard murder mystery and a frame-up.
It’s essentially a "Dad Movie" where the dad happens to be a retired CIA operative. Because the stakes are more about clearing a name than rescuing a child from a horrific fate, the tension feels artificial. Critics absolutely mauled it—the 13% score on Rotten Tomatoes isn't an exaggeration—because it takes a character we liked and puts him in a story that feels like it was written by an AI in 2014.
If your kid is specifically looking for the "one man against the world" trope, there are better ways to spend an evening.
We generally recommend this only as "background noise" movie. It’s the kind of thing you put on while you’re folding laundry or scrolling on your phone. It doesn’t demand your full attention, and frankly, it doesn’t deserve it. If your teen insists on watching it because they’ve seen the memes or like the "particular set of skills" speech from the first one, just be prepared for them to start asking when it’s over about forty minutes in.
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