Liam Neeson Never Made Taken 4 For A Lot Of Good Reasons

Pierre Morel’s “Taken” is far from an action classic, but the hook of sex traffickers inadvertently kidnapping the daughter of a ludicrously lethal CIA agent worked well enough to make the film a decent afternoon time-waster, particularly with an actor of Liam Neeson’s caliber cast as the pissed-off papa bear. Moviegoers turned out in big numbers and got precisely what they paid to see (judging from the film’s A- Cinemascore), so 20th Century Fox ordered up a sequel figuring undemanding action junkies wouldn’t mind if Neeson’s daughter got kidnapped again. They figured correctly (though this time his ex-wife was kidnapped), and scored an even bigger success. So they went back to the well a third time, and made roughly the same amount of dough without breaking the bank with the budget.

There was no “Taken 4” (if you don’t count the one featuring Jimmy Kimmel), which flies in the face of studio franchise conventional wisdom that holds you keep pumping out installments of junk until the junk stops being reasonably profitable. You could argue that having Maggie Grace getting kidnapped multiple times strained credibility, but A) they cleverly waited until the third act to kidnap her in “Taken 3,” B) you could give her a daughter for bad guys to kidnap (which would make grandpappy Neeson twice as mad) and C) Charles Bronson made five “Death Wish” movies in which the filmmakers kept finding slain family members and friends for him to avenge.

So why did the “Taken” franchise flame out after the third movie grossed $326 million on a $48 million budget?

The primary reason the “Taken” film franchise has yet to become a quadrilogy is that Neeson, having unexpectedly reinvented himself as an action star, felt the whole endeavor had become totally silly. “There’s only so many times your daughter can be taken,” he exclaimed to Stephen Colbert. He joked that he’d have to beg the kidnappers to take his daughter in a fourth film.

Neeson didn’t even want to make “Taken 3.” As he told Graham Norton“I said the second (installment) wouldn’t happen, and I said I wouldn’t do a third one if someone got taken.” He only made the second sequel because the filmmakers went “Death Wish” with it, and killed off his wife (Famke Janssen), which he felt wouldn’t be as insulting to the audience.

As slasher franchises have taught us, you can insult the hell out of the audience’s intelligence as long as you serve up enough red meat. You just can’t do it with the man who played Oskar Schindler in the lead, which is why the “Taken” team switched gears and did a prequel TV series for NBC in 2017. The problem here was that no one ever cared about Bryan Mills; they only watched the movies for Neeson’s bloody, stone-faced extrajudicial shenanigans. And this is why the “Taken” series only lasted 26 episodes.

Now that it’s been 11 years since “Taken 3,” you might think that Neeson would get a little nostalgic and consider returning to the role. Neeson, however, is now 72 years old, and, back in 2015, told The Guardian he had maybe two more years of action movies in him. “I’m in a very, career-wise, great place,” he said. “The success of certainly the ‘Taken’ films … Hollywood seems to see me in a different light.” He went on to say, “I get sent quite a few action-oriented scripts, which is great. I’m not knocking it. It’s very flattering. But there is a limit, of course.”

So you should probably rule him out for James Bond, as well.