In 2009, the film Taken proved to be a surprise hit at the box-office, drawing in audiences with its simple premise of a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative Bryan Mills, played by Liam Neeson, ripping up Paris in search of his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who has been kidnapped by a human trafficking ring run by a bunch of Albanians.
Using Hollywood logic, therefore, this was a film that was ripe for a sequel, no matter how thin the plot of the first film was.
The sequel, simply titled Taken 2, picks up where its predecessor left off. At the very beginning of the film, Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija) the father of the deceased head of the trafficking operation, vows at the very graves of his son and his dead cohorts to exact revenge on Mills and his loved ones.
Mills invites his daughter Kim and his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) to spend some time with him in Istanbul, where he has a brief job providing security for a Sheik, after he learns that Lenore's somewhat rocky marriage to her new husband has taken a turn for the worse, with him having cancelled a planned trip to China.
The Albanians track the Mills family down to Instanbul while they are on their holiday, and pretty much all hell breaks loose as they seek to exact their revenge.
The first film was a reasonably entertaining experience, but not something I thought would support a sequel. Truth be told the only reason I caught the second was that I'm a sucker for films with exotic locations, and in that aspect this film does not disappoint with its sweeping, panoramic shots of what is arguably one of Eastern Europe's most famous cities. Particularly striking for me were the shots of the world-renowned Hagia Sophia.
In almost every other respect, however, the film, for me, was utterly forgettable. The action choreography, from the fist fights to rooftop chases to car chases, all felt like poor copies of action sequences in other, far superior films. I did enjoy the bits of the film showing Mills' craftiness, letting audiences know he's got as much brains as he does brawn. These are the scenes in which he basically talks Kim through the process of locating him and Lenore, though the fact that this involves throwing live grenades around a populated city just so Mills can hear the explosions is more than a little off-putting. Apart from that, there really wasn't anything about this film that made it look like anything other than the cash grab that it is. As an action film, this has been done, and done much, much better.
Some people have talked about how the first film established Neeson as a "thinking man's action hero." Well, all I see in this film is a poor man's Jason Bourne, and that's even AFTER the Bourne franchise itself has been somewhat impoverished by a lackluster spinoff.
1.5/5
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