5. Taken 3 (2014)
Liam Neesons foray into the Paris underworld turned him into a fully-fledged action star overnight, with the guttural and extremely dangerous Bryan Mills now the character he is best known for portraying. In Taken, Mills goes on the hunt for his daughter after she is kidnapped by human traffickers in a pretty formulaic story, though where Taken differs from your everyday revenge flick is in the quality of the action sequences. Too often are films of this type described as high-octane and fast-paced, but once Taken gets going the 91 minute runtime disappears faster than Neesons prey. The same couldnt be said for Taken 2, which served up more of the same and could well have been a film made up of deleted scenes from the original. Still, Neeson remains fun to watch as Mills and it has something to say about the futility of vengeance. The less said about Taken 3, the better. The entire franchise is centred around the very particular set of skills that Neeson has acquired over a long career. Instead of carting him out for a slightly-tweaked version of the previous films in which his wife (who, lets face it, was a complete bitch) is bumped off, they could have shown us exactly how many asses Bryan Mills had to kick to become such a hard case. It was established on screen that at age 21 Mills enlisted in the United States Army, and at 23 joined the Special Forces before going on to work for the CIA as a so-called "preventer". A prequel should have spanned the length of the character's notorious career, the birth of his daughter and the breakdown of his relationship with his wife. This would have freshened up the formula and worked as a homage to what could have been a new cult action hero.