Bryan (Liam Neeson) is an ex C.I.A. operative. When his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace) was kidnapped in France in Taken, he had to kill a few goons. Now the story moves from Paris to Istanbul, and the goons who lived want revenge. They want him and they want his estranged wife Lenore (Famke Janssen).
Giving Lenore more of a role in the sequel, we find the two estranged parents brought back together after she splits from her new boyfriend and toys with the idea of going back to her husband. Neeson suggests he, and his daughter and estranged wife have a long overdue vacation since he’ll be in Turkey on business anyway. Of course we know going in that somebody will be kidnapped in Istanbul so the film doesn’t have to have the grit of the first one, though miraculously, it does. That’s the sign of a good script!
In Taken Neeson found his daughter within 72 hours to a city of 12,000,000, in Taken 2 we are’t sure of the head count but the streets are dirty and the stakes are raised. When he’s taken Neeson thinks in terms of counting the seconds, the sounds, the van’s left and right hand turns in order to backtrack to where his daughter might be. Now I don’t know about you, but when I’m on a vacation overseas and jet lag kicks in, I can barely navigate my way to a Zagat rated restaurant let alone dodge bullets to backtrack my way to the hotel from the rear of a van… with a black burlap bag over my head!
The film focuses on an ever-growing teen daughter and all the ‘normal’ things dads go through. Drivers permits, parallel parking the Escalade, and the new hormone-friendly boyfriend, Jamie (Luke Grimes.) But with Neeson as a dad he goes the distance that an every day dad would love to go (like planting a device in the daughter’s cell phone to be able to locate her.)
Screenwriters Robert Kamen and Luc Besson have been a team for awhile and I’m a big fan of their films. They did the original Taken but they also have a huge history from the Transporter franchise starring sexy-hot Jason Statham. Their films always have a similar theme of seedy men going after damsels-in-distress while kick-butt heros rescue them. But beyond that, their stories, though often over-the-top, give us a total shock factor and original plot ideas instead of the same ole/same ole (like when Neeson tells his daughter to let a grenade go off from a rooftop so that he can measure the distance to how far apart they are.) But at the same time there’s nonsense-circumstances that add to the far-fetched fun of this popcorn-chomping flick. Take the guards who may as well be asleep. One would think that Murad, the bad guy, would have had them killed for all the times they let Neeson escape.
And speaking of the bad guy Murad (Rade Sherbedgia) he wants Neeson dead for killing his son even when Neeson reminds him that his son kidnapped his daughter and drugged and killed hundreds of innocent teen girls. Murad doesn’t care. He’s the epitome of evil and tells Neeson he’ll do things to his daughter that probably aren’t alowed to be repeated in this review. Apparently the dead son doesn’t fall too far from the evil father tree.
Director Helmer Olivier Megaton (who worked with Kamen and Besson on “Colombiana”) proves he can direct a big box office winner. A film this good stands on its own merit but since it’s a sequel it loses 1/2 a tiara just because Neeson kept saying “It’s gonna be okay.” Yeah, sure. three a half tiaras