Liam Neeson is back as retired CIA Operative, Bryan Mills in Taken 2. The movie picks up the plot of Taken (Mills comes to Paris to rescue his daughter from Albanian sex traffickers) and reverses it. The sex trafficker’s father (Rade Šerbedžija) declares vengeance on Mills and abducts him and his wife in Istanbul, leaving their daughter to do the rescuing.
Neeson’s charm Paired with Mills’ unrelenting brutality proved to be a winning combination for audiences. Unfortunately, Taken 2 is an empty retread that, despite some high-octane action scenes, fails to live up to the successes of Taken in every way. However, the film isn’t a total loss and despite the connections to the original, action fans who enjoy seeing Neeson snap necks and crash cars will find the sequel entertaining.
Instead of showing audiences a continuation of the unique family dynamic established in Taken, Taken 2 repackages the characters to help sell Mills’ desperation this round. Director Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3, Colombiana) gradually allows the tension to dissipate. The initially engaging action, which includes a chase that looks like the classic video game Crazy Taxi, and a hilarious deployment of hand grenades, gradually gives way to grinding repetition.
The major problem lies in the story. The bad guys aren’t even given a shred of character, we’ve no particular reason to fear them and they look so similar to one another that they might even be played by the same two stunt men.
The screenplay from Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen is lacking in surprises or suspense, Taken 2 merely regurgitates sequences from the first film. The decision to change the location of the action from Paris to Istanbul feels like an attempt to hide how similar the two films are, and if anything, the rather unpleasant streak of xenophobia present in Taken is even more pronounced in the sequel.
Any sequel would probably have to involve the character once again doggedly pursuing criminals and rescuing someone special, but Taken 2’s carbon copying of the original is laughable, right down to the scene where Neeson calls his daughter and tells her that this time the whole family is going to be taken. There’s a bored, neutered quality to Taken 2 that makes it feel more like a bad dream than a film in its own right. Characters and locations come and go with no respect for causality, and the simplistic narrative keeps the stakes remarkably low. Bullets fly but leave no wounds; bones are broken soundlessly; men live and die just out of frame.
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