Neeson Month: Mini Review - Taken 2

It’s Neeson Month

And we continue our look at the Taken series, we will move onto other things Neeson starred in but Taken is the one that defined his role in the action genre, and since we’re not looking at Schindler’s list this month, it’s an apt starting point.

Taken 2 came out in 2012 and once again made a decent profit making $370m on a $45m budget. Unlike the first movie though, it only holds a 22% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that’s an intense drop, let’s see if an analysis can work out why.

Taken 2 opens with Bryan having gotten somewhat closer to his family, although Kim has a boyfriend he doesn’t know about (and actually is kinda pointless) and he didn’t know about his ex-wife’s divorce (*insert inaudible grumble*) until the day. To try and cheer them up, he invites them to Istanbul. Yeah… Why would they ever go on holiday again after the last movie?

Speaking of the last movie, and I will be, a lot, the father of one of the people Bryan killed now seeks revenge on Neeson and does, what else, attempt to kidnap his family. So it’s up to Bryan to kill everyone who stands in his way and perform a rescue.

If you’re experiencing déjà vu with that description, yeah, you’re not alone, this setup is eerily familiar to the first movie. In fact, bar the scenes in America, this is the first movie done twice but without the detective work that added the needed tension to make this action/suspense movie work.

There’s no mystery to who the bad guys are in this, which in one way is useful because in making the motivations clear certain elements of the movie feel less contrived. But the locations aren’t a mystery either because Bryan has perfect recall and it’s really kinda stupid. Also, somehow listening for the sound of a nearby grenade helps him narrow down the location. 

You may as well call this movie Taken twice, because it kind of is, but to shake things up a little, they switch roles for the first attempt. It’s Kim trying to rescue her father. She does this by using the convenient spare phone Bryan had (it’s not free of contrivances) and he gives her the instructions over the phone, just like in the first movie! Even when they try to be different they end up being the first movie.

So, the second taken in Taken 2 involves a crappy and boring car chase that ultimately accomplishes nothing, then Bryan uses his perfect recall to track down the bad guys and in the fight that ensues, the action is incomprehensible. Stop cutting, stop moving the camera around, I can barely understand what’s going on. Clearly suffering from Jason Bourne syndrome there.

But that’s not the end of it. He confronts the leader of the terrorists or whatever and gives him a choice, now this in itself might be logical if he hadn’t killed quite literally everyone else. He doesn’t want his sons to go after him, but what about the family of everyone else you just killed? Bit late for that, isn’t it?

This movie isn’t horrible to watch, it just has issues that were less of an issue in the first movie, has some pretty boring and some pretty dumb parts and some relatively uninteresting performances.

Rating 40/100