Taken 2 is the kind of movie that most people will immediately deride as another cheap money-grab by a cash-hungry film studio. Well, those people are partially right. Inevitably, as with all sequels, part two is not nearly as original as the first blockbuster action flick, which starred Liam Neeson as a covert-ops dad on the hunt for his abducted daughter. Nevertheless, those who claim that Taken 2 is nothing more than a rehash are wrong—it’s easy enough to deride any formulaic action film sequel, but it’s undeniable that Taken 2 is pure entertainment.
The story itself focuses on Bryan Mills (Neeson), a former CIA operative accepting a job in Istanbul, only to see that his entire family is faced with mortal danger as the family of Mills’s victims from the first film seeks revenge. This time, though, Mills has even worse luck, in that he is captured and must first escape before rescuing his family.
Playing Mills’s daughter Kim is Maggie Grace, here taking a more active and independent role than she did in the first movie. Grace fits in well into her new role as an action heroine, fighting the forces of the European underground alongside her overburdened dad with panache.
A lot of the most surprisingly funny scenes in Taken 2 occur between the interactions of Grace’s character and Neeson’s. However, there were some problems in the script which strained the quality of the onscreen relationship between the father-daughter duo. More than once, in fact, the dialogue was inadvertently laughable. And that’s not a bad thing. Multiple times, I found myself laughing out loud at the ridiculous things that were being said. And if you see this movie, you’ll laugh, too.
But those moments are welcomed points of relief where you realize that this is a popcorn flick whose purpose is to be enjoyable on every level, not to delve into the pressing social issues of the day. In essence, the people who come to this movie expecting it to be a fun action movie will not be disappointed.
However, if there is one thing that can be said, it is that Liam Neeson can make a movie worth seeing. Whether he’s staring down an Albanian drug dealer or unintentionally producing laughs though his poorly written lines, he makes Taken 2 worth facing the downpour of negative criticism. In the end, this is the movie to watch if you want to see Liam Neeson at his action-packed finest.
