First of all, this movie takes a solid hour to even get to any good action sequences. And then when it does, there are so many choppy screen cuts that you can barely even tell what is going on. It is not a good thing to take so long in a Taken movie to get to the action, because it is not Liam Neeson and Maggie Grace's acting skills that are bringing people to the movie. It is also not a good thing to have the main bad guy be in nasty tighty-whities during the climactic battle scene, unless you want the whole theater to laugh at the movie.
Second of all, this movie has the cliche action movie cop who is obsessed with catching the main character while also respecting him for some odd reason. We see this same element in movies like Gone In Sixty Seconds, The Fugitive, and many others. In Taken 3, it is Forrest Whitaker. This would be fine and all if there ended up being any type of resolution to the relationship whatsoever, or explained his idiosyncrasies and obsession with Liam Neeson's character at all. To be honest, if his character and the entire police plot line had been completely eliminated from the movie, I think it would have been much better.
Third, this movie may have had one of the most abrupt endings of any movie ever made. It came out of nowhere, as though the production team straight up ran out of funding, so they just had to wrap it up really quick.
Overall, I don't think the general public was hoping that they were going to reinvent the wheel with this movie, but rather, that they were just going to stick with what made the others great: Liam Neeson killing every single person that had even spoken to his family member since they were taken. Ridiculous? Yes. But very entertaining. This movie simply did not deliver. I agree with one critic who said, "Taken 3 makes Taken 2 look like Taken 1."