Film relies on cheap thrills to play off well-received action plot
“Taken” was the surprise box office hit back in 2009 that completely redefined Liam Neeson as an action star. The French action film was released here in America as an attempt to market internationally, but nobody expected the movie to bring in $145 million in the North American box office.
With this type of success always comes the expectation of a sequel — the kind of sequel that exists only to fatten the wallets of anybody on board the gravy train. They don’t worry about attention to detail and creativity so long as they feel like they are giving fans of the original film what they want to see.
So how do screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen try to up the tension and thrills from the last movie? Well this time, things are not only personal for our hero, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), but for the bad guys as well. Still, didn’t these guys see the first film and witness how bad-ass Neeson was?
Four years after Albanian human traffickers kidnapped Mills’ daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) in Paris, Mills takes a trip to Istanbul, Turkey. Interesting enough, but we never really know why because the story here is about as straightforward as they come, rushing into why people would see this movie in the first place: the action.
Mills’ ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and their daughter surprise him with a visit, prompting Kim to play matchmaker with her estranged parents. However, a group of Albanians kidnap the couple as an act of revenge by the group’s leader (Rade Serbedzija), whose son (the guy whom Mills strapped to a chair and electrocuted) was killed by Mills in the first film.
And how do we know that these are the bad guys? They do every generic thing that foreign villains seem to do: they sit around, drink ouzo and watch televised broadcasts of non-American football. And that’s not the only stereotype used here.
Director Olivier Megaton resorts to standard typecasting while presenting the city of Istanbul. Instead of presenting what wonders and beauties the city surely contains, we get the sense that Istanbul is a dangerous place to live with all the dark alleyways and scurvy men.
All of these are clear indications that Besson and Kamen refused to take “Taken 2” as seriously as “Taken.” There’s one sequence where Kim takes the wheel of a taxi while Mills instructs her to speed through the winding streets of Istanbul during a car chase, despite Kim failing her driver’s test twice back in California. Was this intended to be funny? Because I found myself chuckling quite a bit.
Bottom line, “Taken 2” just lacks the energy and thrill that made the original “Taken” such a fun thriller. It doesn’t help that Megaton clumsily handles the action sequences and edits almost the entire movie with quick cuts into each scene, almost like a drunken karaoke singer ruining the only song from a one-hit wonder.
At 60, Neeson still keeps his heroic form from the first film, and you have to admire a serious actor who can keep a straight face while delivering such heroic lines as, “Do whatever you want to me, but leave her alone.”
It’s all evidence of how lazily written the entire film is. The screenwriters don’t even bother to establish that Mills is an ex-CIA operative in the sequel. They just expect returning audiences to figure it out for themselves, relying on quick flashbacks from the original.
Nearing the end of the film, Mills offers the head honcho a choice to make: don’t learn your lesson and prepare for a sequel, or stop because Mills is “tired of it all.”
Quite frankly, so am I. In the end, “Taken 2” is the perfect example that some sequels, no matter how big a moneymaker they may be, should never happen.
If you weren’t a big fan of the first film, then you will be taken on a pretty boring ride.