The first trailer for Taken 3 (or Tak3n, as it’s officially titled) has debuted. Liam Neeson (A Walk Among the Tombstones) – who once stated that even one sequel to the original Taken would be beyond belief – returns as the patriarch of the Mills family, with Maggie Grace (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn) and Famke Janssen (X-Men: Days of Future Past) reprising their roles as his daughter and wife, respectively.
From the looks of it, the third installment of the franchise sees the action moving away from the kidnapping route of the first two films on a journey towards a decidedly different path. The trailer starts with Bryan Mills and his wife looking happy and hopeful as they enjoy wine and conversation, but as is prone to happen in the Mills household, things go terribly, terribly wrong. This time it’s the mysterious murder of Bryan’s wife, whom he finds murdered in their bed, leaving Bryan as the primary suspect. The rest of the trailer sees him evading cops while trying to find out who killed his wife and framed him.
Joining the cast this time is Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) as the cop in charge of hunting Mills down. Olivier Megaton, director of Taken 2, returns behind the lens. Tak3n will be released in theaters on January 9th of next year.
Many have noted the similarity of the film’s plot with that of 1993’s The Fugitive, the highly regarded film starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. For Neeson, who initially thought the idea of a Taken 3 wasn’t likely because his daughter being kidnapped again would just be “bad parenting”, perhaps the drastic shake-up in plot this time around was enough to convince the actor to come back. Still, Neeson has maintained in interviews recently that this would be his last turn as Bryan Mills.
For Besson and production company EuropaCorp however, the franchise has proven quite lucrative, and if The Transporter trilogy is any indication (in which they re-casted newcomer Ed Skrein in Jason Statham’s original role), they might be willing to expand the Taken universe without Neeson, if need be.
Leave a Comment