He doesn’t know who you are. He doesn’t know what you want. But what you will find out is that he possesses a very particular set of skills. Skills he’s acquired over a very long career. And they are skills that set Oscar-nominee Liam Neeson’s career in an entirely new direction all the way back in 2008 when he took on the leading role of Bryan Mills, the aged action hero at the center of the first Taken, which is set to stream free.
Not only will the first Taken soon land on the free streaming platform Tubi
, but so will its sequels, Taken 2 and Taken 3, meaning that you can sit back, relax, and watch Neeson knock bad guys’ heads together for an entire trilogy. If that’s your idea of relaxing, of course. All three Taken movies are set to hit Tubi on June 1.
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Audiences can’t get enough of these particular set of skills.
Directed by Pierre Morel from a script written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, the first Taken follows Neeson as a former government operative who comes out of retirement and uses all his extensive training to rescue his estranged daughter from a slave trade operation. The movie put Neeson on a very different path as an actor, cementing him as an all-new action icon.
‘Taken’ Changed the Trajectory of Liam Neeson’s Career
Picking up two years after the movie which, spoiler alert, sees Neeson rescue his daughter and leaving piles of bodies along the way, Taken 2 was unleashed in 2012 and finds Bryan being taken after he is targeted by the father of one of the men he killed while saving his daughter two years earlier. The third and currently final movie in the franchise, Taken 3, sees Bryan once again in the crosshairs of the CIA, the FBI, and the police after he’s framed for the murder of his ex-wife. Big mistake.
After the first Taken was met with largely positive reviews from critics (60% on Rotten Tomatoes) and acclaim from audiences (85% on the Popcornmeter), the sequels sadly offered diminishing returns. Taken 2 stands at just 22% on Rotten Tomatoes (52% from audiences), with Taken 3 even worse off at 12% from critics (and 43% from audiences). But you’re not here for a cinematic masterpiece. Neeson has plenty of them in his back catalog. No, you’re here to delight in seeing the renowned actor deliver justice with his fists. And, with this in mind, you could do a lot worse than the Taken trilogy.
While Neeson has now revealed that he plans to retire from the action movie genre soon (though he does have several action movies in the works, including Cold Storage, The Ice Road 2: Road to the Sky, The Mongoose, and the action-comedy The Naked Gun), fans will be wondering if there are any plans for Taken 4 before that happens. Sadly, it sounds like the actor has left the incredibly capable Bryan Mills behind for good, with Neeson saying in 2016…
“No, there’s not. There’s only so many times your daughter can be taken. Actually if we do have another it will be, ‘Please can you take my daughter’?”
