By Jeremy Hannaford (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: October 10, 2012
Whenever we watch a film about a hero burning a path to their goal by taking out tons of bad guys along the way, rarely do we think about the consequences of these fallen thugs. After all, they might just have dangerous bad guy family members who are pretty peeved off and wanting to seek vengeance against the hero. This is a question that Taken 2 ponders but doesn’t really answer. All it really shows is that they just need to die, too.
Liam Neeson returns as Brian Mills, the ex-CIA agent whose threat of locating and killing his daughter’s captors is a huge tag line for the original Taken. This film’s tagline however feels like, “Don’t try it again or you’re going to get what’s coming to you.” The original film made a very impressive gross income so the idea of a sequel to something that Luc Besson had written didn’t seem that big of a surprise – especially when one thinks about The Transporter series. While Besson has stayed in the realm of the action shoot ‘em up genre for several decades now, he usually tries to add a little flair to each project. With Taken 2, he seemed to just take bits and pieces from his other films and slap them together rather than creating something different.
Instead of exploring the idea of sifting through the Eastern Europe sex trade and spending weeks trying to find his daughter, Taken 2 is really a slow build up to a very bad daytrip Brian Mills takes to Istanbul. As said before, the film’s antagonists are in fact family members and associates of Mills’ victims from the first film who are seeking revenge. By giving a face to the villains, the mystery factor of the original is replaced with a supposed feeling of compassion and recognition.
This falls flat however as the leader played by Rade Serbedzija just repeats he is angry that his son is dead and that he is angry with Mills and wants to see him punished. Nothing else really escapes his mouth. Also, by giving the villains a face, Besson writes them to be stronger and more trained so Brian Mills can’t just karate chop them to death. But then it just turns into The Transporter and loses the very essence that made Taken a cool watch.
When walking into this movie, you’re probably not looking for great acting or storytelling. What you are looking for is action scenes. There are definitely some decent ones here, but it feels like they are few and far between compared to the first film. Besson gives more screen time to Mills’ daughter played by Maggie Grace, portraying her as a scared girl who develops the strength to do what is necessary. She takes up a large portion of the film so Liam Neeson gets only a few distinct scenes where he gets to kill bad guys. Director Oliver Megaton returns to another Luc Besson project after directing the dismal Transporter 3 and does everything that he did wrong in that film with this one.
With the unfortunate help of film editor Camille Delamarre, they still think that overusing cuts in fight scenes makes them more intense and fast paced. Instead, it just makes it look like Neeson is playing patty cake with the bad dudes and is very disorientating.
Compared to the first film, Taken 2 falls flat on everything that made the original a good entertaining action film. It is a shame that the series will continue on a dull note rather than the where the bar was set by the first film.
