5 things about Taken 2

1. All I really wanted them to do was recreate Taken. If they had made the same movie, but with new fights, I would have been happy. What made Taken: The First Take is the Deepest so great was the straightforward premise, Liam Neeson coming out of nowhere (as far as I knew) as a late-life action star badass, and the gritty feel to the movie. This time around, they sacrificed a lot of the things that made the first one great. The premise undercut the effectiveness of the first film (more on this later) and Neeson was showing his age (still strong for 60!). Rather than keeping the look of the film grounded and gritty, the director opted for quick cuts and flashy camera tricks that only served to take me out of the film.

2. One of the things that made Taken 1: the Takening so effective was the randomness of the abduction. The feeling that this could literally happen to anyone, that we're all one bad event away from exiting middle class comfort and entering a nightmare world, is terrifying. The second film abandons this in favor of a revenge plot driven by the father of one of the human traffickers that Liam Neeson (I will not learn his character's name) killed in the first film. I've never savagely tortured or killed anyone, and I'm pretty sure no one in my immediate family has either. I will never be in a foreign country and, through no fault of my own, find myself in this situation. While this type of escalation made sense for a franchise like The Transporter (also produced by Luc Besson), which delights in its own ridiculousness and indulges in the necessity of a plot only to move the audience from one action set-piece to the next, it is clear that Taken wants us to care about its characters on some level. I suppose the upside of not being able to put myself in any of the character's shoes is that I no longer have to feel that the ability to savagely end lives with my bare hands is a prerequisite for starting a family.

3. Everything that wasn't Liam Neeson wrecking dudes was terrible. I don't expect great dialogue from a mindless action film, or even great acting, but when DREDD 3D has more believable characters than your film, you are fucking up. The characters might as well have stared into the camera and given testimonials, "This is my name. This is my one dimension showing I am good/bad. This is my relationship with Liam Neeson." Then they could have gotten right to Liam Neeson being Wolverine with no superpowers and cut 45 minutes out of the film that I could give a shit about.

4. Jesus Christ, the car chase scene. I can imagine the conversation in the editing room:

"I refuse to edit this scene to under 10 minutes. I love that it feels 2 hours long."
"But, we need to do something to make it more exciting. At least cut it down to feeling like 90 minutes."
"Fine... Oh, I've got it! In video games they sometimes have voice-overs of characters saying the same exact sound bite over and over again. What if..."
"I see where you're going! Let's have Liam Neeson say 'Go' and 'Faster' one million goddamn times to draw a stark contrast to how fucking slow this scene moves."
"Perfect!! If we pull this off, we'll have done the impossible: make the audience sick of Neeson's silky Irish voice!"
"Do you want to have them crash the car into the US Embassy at the end for literally no fucking reason?"
"You are a goddamn genius."

 

Please just pull the trigger, both of you.

5. If this movie is on FX, feel free to leave it in the background as you multitask. This will not be the movie you and your bros geek out about, the way you did for Taken. There is no awesome threatening monologue, though the speech from the first film is referenced often. But don't worry, it made its budget back in the first weekend and explicitly laid out the premise for a third film in the last ten minutes. See you in 1-3 years for Tak3n.