The Entire Taken Timeline Explained

The most iconic moment in the entire "Taken" franchise isn't a brutal hand-to-hand fight or an intense gun battle. No, the franchise's most memorable moment arguably comes when Bryan Mills speaks to his daughter's kidnapper on the telephone. He explains to the kidnapper that he doesn't have money to pay ransom, but he does have "a very particular set of skills," learned over a long career, that he will use to rescue his daughter.

The films never fully explain Bryan's history, but mention is made of "Langley," as in Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the CIA. In the first movie, Bryan describes his former career as a preventer, someone who stopped bad things from happening, but he doesn't elaborate beyond that. In "Taken 3," Inspector Franck Dotzler (Forest Whitaker) does a background check on Mills and his friends, Sam, Mark, and Bernie, who are all close friends in the present day and worked together in the past. Dotzler says of Bryan, "At 21, he's in the army. At 23, he joins the special forces," at which point his record abruptly ends, meaning that's when he was picked up by the CIA. At some point, he marries Lenore (Famke Janssen) and they have Kim, but his dedication to his work means he's a neglectful patriarch and he ends up divorced. Sometime after retiring from the CIA, Bryan moves to Los Angeles to be closer to his estranged daughter, leading to the events of "Taken."

As any father would, Bryan does whatever he can to get his daughter back. Unlike most middle-aged men, Bryan is proficient with all manners of close quarters hand-to-hand combat, firearms, tracking, and he has access to world-class intelligence services thanks to the expertise of his friend Sam (Leland Orser), who runs a high-end private security company. Thanks to the description Kim gave as she was being kidnapped and a voice analysis, Sam is able to identify the kidnapper as Marko Hoxha, an Albanian gangster from the town of Tropojë. Bryan finds Marko's safe house full of goons and he mercilessly kills them all. Along the way, Bryan finds Amanda, dead from a heroin overdose. Bryan quietly mourns the unfortunate girl, but the movie doesn't have time to dwell on her tragic death; there's more human trafficking scum to kill.

For Marko himself, his death varies depending on whether one watches the PG-13 theatrical cut or the unrated version of "Taken." In both versions, Bryan tortures Marko with electricity as the gangster is tied to a metal chair. In the theatrical cut, Bryan attaches jumper cables to the Marko's chair. In the Unrated version, Bryan plunges two sharp metal rods into Marko's thighs, adding some extra pizazz to the electrifying enhanced interrogation. Either way, both versions end with Bryan learning a name, "Patrice Saint-Clair." Bryan then flips the electricity on, leaving Marko to die a violent — and presumably crispy — death.

"Taken" concludes with Bryan reuniting his daughter with her mother and stepfather, but there's one last scene before the movie ends. Early on in the film, Bryan's tough guy credentials are established when he disarms and incapacitates a knife-wielding assailant while working security for a pop star, Sheerah, played by Holly Valance. To express her gratitude, Sheerah offers to introduce Kim to her vocal teacher and see if she has what it takes to become a pop star. The final scene of the film has Bryan and Kim meet Sheerah for a music lesson. The door closes behind them as they all move forward with their lives, ending the movie on a low-key note about moving on from trauma.

Sheerah claims that if her vocal coach says Kim can sing, then she can sing. While the results of the vocal lesson are never disclosed to the viewer, it's likely Kim didn't have the natural chops to become a pop star. "Taken 2" makes fleeting mention of Kim's ongoing music lessons, but "Taken 3" quietly drops this storyline entirely. Maybe Kim can carry a tune, but can she rock an entire stadium full of screaming fans? We'll never know. 

In the years between "Taken" and its sequel, the marriage between Lenore and Stuart St. John has fallen onto hard times. They're all but separated, and early in "Taken 2" Stuart spitefully cancels a vacation they had previously planned. Bryan invites his ex-wife and daughter to accompany him to Istanbul. He has a security job to do, but when it's done he'll have a few days for a genuine vacation. Little does he know, he's just placed a target on their backs, as well as his own.

Kim stays at the hotel while Lenore and Bryan go on something of a friendly date. But before anything romantic can happen, Bryan notices that they're being followed. Despite his best efforts, he and Lenore get taken (that's the name of the movie, after all), though he's able to warn Kim. Thanks to her father's phone call, Kim manages to escape from armed gunmen who murder multiple innocent people in their pursuit of the young woman.

Following her father's orders, Kim grabs a gun and several grenades from Bryan's secure briefcase. While on the phone, she detonates one of the grenades, the sound of which her father is able to use to discern his position relative to Kim. It's a bit complicated and stretches believability, but the scene ends with Kim throwing the gun down a rooftop chimney, which Bryan is able to use to kill his captors and escape.

Calling back to the film's first act, which ended with Kim taking a singing lesson, "Taken 2" ends with Kim finally passing her driver's test. It was mentioned she had failed, more than once, earlier in the movie. To celebrate, Kim and her parents (sans Stuart!) get milkshakes at a little shop on the pier. Kim invites a special guest: her boyfriend, Jamie, played by Luke Grimes. Earlier in the film, Kim had kept her boyfriend a secret from her father, worrying that he might overreact. Her formally introducing them shows that Kim and her father have developed a greater level of trust in one another.

To be honest, it's a pretty trite ending compared to the first "Taken." Whereas that film ended with a subtle thematic overtone involving moving on from traumatic events, the ending of "Taken 2" feels almost like the final tag at the end of a domestic sitcom, where everybody has one last laugh before the credits roll. At least "Taken 2" doesn't end with a corny freeze frame, for what that's worth.

While unraveling the conspiracy against him, Bryan must evade Forest Whitaker, his police pursuer. You could argue that Whitaker's character, Inspector Franck Dotzler, is basically a less charismatic rip-off of Tommy Lee Jones from "The Fugitive." The time dedicated to this new character is a large part of why, at nearly two hours in length, "Taken 3" is the longest entry in the trilogy by a wide margin.

After waterboarding Stuart, accusing him of murdering his own wife, Bryan gets Lenore's second husband to admit to shady dealings with a Russian gangster. Stuart says their business dealings went sideways and Oleg Malankov killed Lenore to incentivize Stuart to pay him back. With tech support from his trusty pal, Sam, Bryan attacks Malankov's penthouse apartment, killing the gangster and all of his bodyguards. The battle is much gorier in the unrated version, with bloody gunshot wounds aplenty; the PG-13 theatrical cut is tame in comparison, even using CGI to remove blood from Bryan and Malankov's faces during their fatal encounter.

"Taken 3" ends with Kim revealing to her father that she's pregnant. Her boyfriend, Jimmy, played by Jonny Weston, is the father. It's not entirely clear if Jimmy is the same character as Jamie from "Taken 2," but their names are eerily similar, so it's possible they were supposed to be the same character until Luke Grimes declined to sign on for "Taken 3." Kim actually found out she was pregnant in the film's first act, but couldn't bring herself to tell her dad right away.

The film's final lines pay tribute to Kim's late mother, with Kim and Jimmy promising to name their baby after Lenore if it's a girl. Hopefully, that means they'll call it "Lenny" if it's a boy, since that was Bryan's affectionate nickname for his ex-wife. As an ending, it feels more appropriate than the milkshakes scene in "Taken 2," but it still lacks the impact one would expect from the end of a trilogy. Overall, "Taken 3" doesn't feel like the end of the "Taken" saga, but just another entry in an increasingly generic action franchise. The recasting of Stuart makes his betrayal less compelling, and the tacked on presence of Forest Whitaker feels like a superfluous waste of one of cinema's most beloved actors. It's not the worst movie in the world, but there's nothing in "Taken 3" that isn't done better in at least half a dozen other Liam Neeson movies.

While "Taken 3" was marketed as the final chapter in the trilogy, nothing ever really ends in Hollywood — as long as there's still money to be made. It's hard to imagine a "Taken" movie without Liam Neeson, though Luc Besson had no issue replacing Jason Statham with Ed Skrein for "The Transporter: Refueled." It's possible the producer might decide to repeat this trajectory with "Taken," rebooting the series with a brand new star, but we'd much rather see a proper "Taken 4" starring Liam Neeson, the one and only Bryan Mills.

Neeson was paid a whopping $20 million to star in 2014's "Taken 3," and while the film brought in less money than "Taken 2," it still managed to rake in an impressive $327 million worldwide on a budget of under $50 million. It's been nearly a decade since then, so a new "Taken" sequel has the potential to feel fresh and new. "Taken 3" ends with Kim revealing to her father that she's pregnant with a baby. Knowing Bryan Mills, it's only a matter of time before his grandchild gets kidnapped, forcing the retired CIA agent to utilize his "particular set of skills" once again.