Starring Liam Neeson, Forest Whitaker and Dougray Scott. Rated 14A. Now playing

In his first two cinematic adventures, retired CIA operative Bryan Mills applied his special set of skills to pursuing people who were, uh, taken. By giving Mills a warm, vulnerable interior to go with his hulking and torture-inclined exterior, Liam Neeson became an iconic action star in his 50s, going on to make a string of cheesy but satisfying thrillers.

In Taken 3, writer-producer Luc Besson and his collaborators (Olivier Megaton is the director of record) at his EuropaCorp action factory have produced another handsome, frenetic, and violent flick. The formula has been tweaked somewhat in that the activity is confined to Los Angeles and Mills is the hunted and not the hunter. It seems that his estranged wife has turned up dead, triggering a manhunt led by a dogged LAPD detective played by Forest Whitaker.

It would be hard to say if Whitaker’s character is exceptionally twitchy or if that is just an artifact of Megaton’s obnoxious cutting volume, which demands a speed ramp, whip pan, or hard cut every other second. This gives Taken 3 a certain amount of extra energy that it probably didn’t need, given its rugged, clever protagonist and the sturdy tropes of “man protects family” and “car rolls down cliff, explodes.”

It just makes the murder mystery harder to follow visually and emotionally, unless you notice the return of one character in notably hairier, eviller form. This particular fellow has so much contempt for the women in his life that he could be a men’s-rights activist. On the plus side, we do get to see Mills waterboarding his douchy rival, an activity that I hope catches on in the men’s-rights movement.

In the meantime, here are some fistfights. Bam!