SummaryAs a retired CIA agent with a particular set of skills, Bryan Mills stopped at nothing to save his daughter Kim from Albanian kidnappers. When the father of one of the kidnappers swears revenge and takes Bryan and his wife hostage during their family vacation in Istanbul, Bryan enlists Kim to help them escape, and uses the same advanced ...
SummaryAs a retired CIA agent with a particular set of skills, Bryan Mills stopped at nothing to save his daughter Kim from Albanian kidnappers. When the father of one of the kidnappers swears revenge and takes Bryan and his wife hostage during their family vacation in Istanbul, Bryan enlists Kim to help them escape, and uses the same advanced ...
Taken 2 my little freind, you rock. Tjis film is so well written and well paced ithat it will have you uessing who is going to get taken. The acting in this film surpasses the acting found in Looper and The Avengers or Te Dark Knight RIses. The story is so original I just didnt understand why they didnt just copy the first ones ideas, I mean there was a scene so well directed where a girl trows grenades, awesome.
Having read the poor reviews but rarely disappointed by Neesom I forced myself to stay positive while wondering all the way until the movie started. I must say that from beginning to end I could not have been more pleasantly surprised. The writing, plot, action, but, without a doubt the acting, all around, was as good as it gets. Besides Neesom's commanding presence the supporting cast was absolutely stellar. If you gave Taken 1 a 10 as it deserved this one would rate a 12 or 13. Do yourselves a favor and do not listen to those panning the film - they very obviously have some ulterior agenda to support. This movie will give you the emotional ride we all deserve when paying these exorbitant ticket prices.
Some of the basic pleasures of the original remain intact (nobody shoots up a small room of bearded Eastern European men like Neeson), but ultimately the film feels compromised.
If you enjoyed Taken you will enjoy this, too. Good casting, good action, good film. As mush as Neeson's character wants to take charge, it is nice to see him learn to train and then defer to others.
While this sequel is even more bland, predictable and cliché than the first opus, it's still a pretty entertaining movie. The acting is a little bit better, the action sequences, while not being that well done are still fairly enjoyable and the final stand off between Neeson and the main villain is great. If you liked the first Taken, you will probably enjoy this sequel.
'Taken 2' is more than just a disappointing sequel, while it has its fair share of great action movie moments, it is unbalanced and horrendously manufactured. I was mildly underwhelmed by the predecessor, 'Taken' (2008) also had great moments of action galore and made Liam Neeson the action star he is. Here, he once again proves why he should be the front man of any action movie, but unfortunately the screenplay allows for some silly moments aplenty. Bryan Mills (Neeson) is back, and treats his family, Lenore (Famke Jannsen) and Kim (Maggie Grace) to a holiday in Istanbul, meanwhile, the fathers of the kidnappers who Bryan killed in the previous film seek out revenge. They manage to track Bryan in his holiday destination, and both Bryan and Lenore end up getting kidnapped, leaving Kim to try and do everything to make sure they get out alive. Bryan manages to instruct Kim on what to do, and they both have to try and find Lenore before it's too late. The sequel does what it promises with its premise, seeing our main hero getting kidnapped by those who want revenge was pretty much all this had going for it. Unfortunately, there's not enough to keep you interested as most of what goes on is rather ludicrous and at times, laughable. The cast do a good job carrying the movie, but the direction by Olivier Megaton is rather uninspired, most of the action scenes are not visible as it is hard to track what is going on. Too many edits is an eyesore. This is a sequel that should remain neglected.
Too-tidy sequel can’t be saved.
“Taken,” about a former CIA operative who uses his considerable brawn and brain to rescue his teenage daughter from a bunch of sadistic sex-trade traffickers, was a surprise hit in 2009. The nervy kid-in-jeopardy thriller opened quietly at the beginning of the year, chugging along to make a respectable $100 million-plus at the box office.
The appeal of “Taken,” apart from its straightforward, unpretentious approach to otherwise pedestrian material, was Liam Neeson. As “Taken” protagonist Bryan Mills, he infused an otherwise by-the-numbers procedural with an ineffable, highly appealing blend of Celtic soul and 6-foot-4-inch heft. As an instantly sympathetic embodiment of paternal reassurance and alpha-male ferocity, Neeson reinvigorated his career with “Taken,” embarking on a series of similarly pulpy thrillers (“Unknown,” “The Grey”) that seemed to surprise even him. You can’t blame Neeson, or the “Taken” producers, for trying to catch lightning in a bottle again.
What you can blame them for is “Taken 2,” a sequel every bit as clumsy, ham-handed, outlandish and laughable as the original was sleek, tough and efficient. “Taken 2” finds Bryan back in Los Angeles, teaching his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace, now officially past her sell-by date playing teenagers) to drive and gazing **** at his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), when he picks Kim up for their weekly Saturday tutorial. When Bryan travels to Istanbul on business, circumstances conspire to bring Kim and Leni there in order to surprise him; soon, all three are caught up in a nasty web of kidnapping, sadistic torture and revenge spun by the very Albanian bad guys Bryan recently vanquished on behalf of his daughter.
It’s a perfectly acceptable setup, but from its first set piece -- a low-octane chase through an Istanbul bazaar, followed by a weirdly muffled, awkwardly choreographed fist fight -- “Taken 2” possesses the perfunctory mark-hitting of a movie more invested in going through the motions than raising its own bar. The spook-tested tricks and superhuman powers of observation that Bryan trotted out in the first film are now played for maximum preposterousness, such as an utterly laughable gambit involving hand grenades and eastward-blowing flags, or a life-saving feat of deduction accomplished with a map, a Sharpie pen and a shoelace.
Bryan is still the man with all the answers, the modern era’s dream of competence and moral clarity rolled into one hunky package. But in the clunky hands of “Taken 2” director Olivier Megaton (working from a phoned-in script by producer Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen), he’s become little more than a know-it-all who dispatches every obstacle as if he’d anticipated it all along. There’s no crafty fun to be had watching him figuring it all out.
By the time “Taken 2” stages a second, ludicrously conceived car chase, which leads to an equally absurd tableau of macho posturing in a Turkish bath, the entire enterprise feels as false and tidy as the tasteful drop of blood that adorns Bryan’s chin. When Neeson visited “The Daily Show” earlier this week, Jon Stewart eagerly asked if a “Taken 3” was in the works. The actor visibly recoiled, his hand slashing his throat in a “that’s enough” gesture, suggesting that the star is painfully aware that sometimes lightning should stay in the bottle.