Review: Taken 2
It's one thing for a movie to be bad. That happens. It's the risk you take when you take the time to venture out of your home and into the streets of your city. A bad movie can be forgivable most of the time, a lot of effort goes into filmmaking and most civilized moviegoers realize that. Sometimes it's kind of a cop-out to label a movie with a one-word descriptor, but if ever a movie could be described in a single word, it would be Taken 2, and that word would be "lazy."
Taking place a couple of years after the events in the 2008 movie Taken, we find that Brian Mills (Liam Neeson) is still being overprotective -- although, after the first film, maybe just appropriately protective -- of his young daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). His ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) tells him to back off slightly -- everyone is grateful for him having saved Kim's life, but they each need to move on in their own way. And hat better place to move on than returning to Europe, where the surviving family members of the criminals Brian killed in the first film are plotting their revenge? Sure enough, kidnappings happen, and Liam Neeson gets to do what he does best.
After the dreadfully long first act, once the action finally takes place, it's just stale. The action never feels tense, the writing is horrible, the action is shot so close that you can't discern anything happening.
That's the generalized statement of how bad Taken 2 is. For more specific criticisms, the situations unfolding onscreen are so mind-numbingly dumb, it's a wonder anyone greenlighted the screenplay. We have Kim -- you know, the kidnapped victim from the first film who should be in some way permanently traumatized on a non-functional level -- put in a position where she isn't kidnapped this time. Instead, she has to help her father figure out where he's been stashed because both he and his ex-wife have been taken. He instructs her to detonate grenades all over Istanbul so he can figure out how far away and from what direction she'll be coming from.
In addition, Kim also inexplicably is still young enough to be an inexperienced driver even though she is clearly 30 years old. Yet she is also given the task of leading a high-speed chase through busy streets and causing all sorts of destruction with no penalty.
Those are just a few of the many problems with Taken 2. It's hard to believe that co-writer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton, who were behind really great films like Léon: The Professional, The Fifth Element and even the underrated Columbiana could make something so inherently lazy it's almost insulting. Taken 2 isn't worth your time or your money, and is barely worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as its predecessor, despite featuring one of the most intimidating characters we've seen in movies in the last few years. This movie was nothing but a giant heartbreak, on every level.