Movie Review - ‘Taken 2’

By Bob Garver

I want to start by say­ing that I wasn’t a fan of 2009’s “Taken”. I found it rou­tine and unen­gag­ing. It is there­fore impor­tant to keep in mind that I am not the audi­ence for this past weekend’s “Taken 2”. Hav­ing said that, even if you were a fan of the orig­i­nal and there­fore are the audi­ence for the sequel, I still don’t think you’ll find much to like about “Taken 2”.

“Taken” saw ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills (Liam Nee­son) track down his kid­napped daugh­ter (Mag­gie Grace) and use his “very par­tic­u­lar set of skills” to wipe out her kid­nap­pers. The appeal of the film com­pletely revolved around Nee­son, a dis­tin­guished older actor breath­ing life into an oth­er­wise bland action movie. His over-the-phone mono­logue to the kid­nap­pers is often ref­er­enced and quoted in pop­u­lar cul­ture. Nee­son wasn’t a stranger to action movies (he was, of course, Qui-Gon Jin in “Star Wars: Episode I” and the vil­lain­ous Ra’s Al Ghoul in “The Dark Knight”), but the idea of him car­ry­ing a non-franchise piece at that point in his career was unusual and intrigu­ing. Nee­son has since starred in many more bland action movies and the nov­elty has long since worn off.

The new film sees Mills vaca­tion­ing with his fam­ily in Istan­bul. There’s a sub­plot about the daugh­ter try­ing to get Mills back together with his ex-wife (Famke Janssen). They all get tar­geted for abduc­tion by the father of one of the dead bad guys from the first movie. Appar­ently the new vil­lain (Rade Serbedz­ija) is cun­ning enough to iden­tify Mills as the man who killed his son and then expertly track him to a coun­try for­eign to both men. He then spends the rest of the movie serv­ing as one of the stu­pid­est seri­ous movie vil­lains I’ve ever seen.

Nat­u­rally, the idiot vil­lain isn’t con­tent to just kill Mills and his fam­ily, he wants Mills to suf­fer first. So he chains up Mills and puts him in a sit­u­a­tion where he’ll have to watch his ex-wife die slowly. Except he doesn’t bother to super­vise as his mas­ter plan unfolds. He leaves the room unat­tended with a sole inept guard wait­ing out­side and a room­ful of dis­tracted hench­men watch­ing tele­vi­sion down the hall. Because it wouldn’t be a bad action movie with­out a room­ful of dis­tracted hench­men watch­ing tele­vi­sion down the hall.

The film resorts to many other painful action movie clichés. Among them is the one where a bad guy inex­plic­a­bly tries to kill some­one exe­cu­tion style (instead of just shoot­ing her at the first oppor­tu­nity), we hear a gun­shot, and then we find out that it wasn’t he who fired. There’s also the one where a char­ac­ter is bad at some­thing and is then called upon to per­form excep­tion­ally well under intense pres­sure (in this case it’s the daugh­ter and dri­ving). For me, the dumb­est was the one where the good guy and a bad guy throw down their weapons and fight each other fairly. This device can be awe­some if the film estab­lishes that both char­ac­ters are for­mi­da­ble fight­ers (or at least inter­est­ing char­ac­ters whose fates we care about), but it’s just Mills against some ran­dom goon. The scene has no rea­son to exist other than to show us that Liam Nee­son can pull off a phys­i­cally demand­ing fight scene.

“Taken 2” is a pretty shame­less cash-in, an action movie with only one unique bit of action (in which hand grenades are used as search tools instead of weapons). Nee­son isn’t the unex­pected wild card he once was, and there’s noth­ing appeal­ing about the rest of the film. It is an unre­mark­able movie born of another unre­mark­able movie.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“Taken 2” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of vio­lence and action, and some sen­su­al­ity. Its run­ning time is 91 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Oct 9 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.