Ex-government operative Bryan Mills is accused of a ruthless murder he never committed or witnessed. As he is tracked and pursued, Mills brings out his particular set of skills to find the true killer and clear his name.
A retired CIA agent travels across Europe and relies on his old skills to save his estranged daughter, who has been kidnapped while on a trip to Paris.
An air marshal springs into action during a transatlantic flight after receiving a series of text messages demanding $150 million into an off-shore account, or someone will die every 20 minutes.
A man awakens from a coma, only to discover that someone has taken on his identity and that no one, (not even his wife), believes him. With the help of a young woman, he sets out to prove who he is.
Disgraced Secret Service agent (and former presidential guard) Mike Banning finds himself trapped inside the White House in the wake of a terrorist attack; using his inside knowledge, Banning works with national security to rescue the President from his kidnappers.
Director:
Antoine Fuqua
Stars:
Gerard Butler,
Aaron Eckhart,
Morgan Freeman
Mobster and hit man Jimmy Conlon has one night to figure out where his loyalties lie: with his estranged son, Mike, whose life is in danger, or his longtime best friend, mob boss Shawn Maguire, who wants Mike to pay for the death of his own son.
After their plane crashes in Alaska, six oil workers are led by a skilled huntsman to survival, but a pack of merciless wolves haunts their every step.
While on a tour of the White House with his young daughter, a Capitol policeman springs into action to save his child and protect the president from a heavily armed group of paramilitary invaders.
A group of Iraq War veterans look to clear their name with the U.S. Military, who suspect the four men of committing a crime for which they were framed.
When his peaceful life is threatened by a high-tech assassin, former black-ops agent Frank Moses reassembles his old team in a last ditch effort to survive and uncover his assailants.
Frank is hired to "transport" packages for unknown clients and has made a very good living doing so. But when asked to move a package that begins moving, complications arise.
The retired CIA agent Bryan Mills invites his teenage daughter Kim and his ex-wife Lenore, who has separated from her second husband, to spend a couple of days in Istanbul where he is working. Meanwhile, the patriarch of the community of the Albanian gang of human trafficking, Murad Krasniqi, seeks revenge for the death of his son and organizes another gang to kidnap Bryan and his family. Bryan and Lenore are abducted by the Albanians, but Kim escapes and is the only hope that Bryan has to escape and save Lenore.Written by
Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Although this movie mostly involves Albanian mafia and thugs, there is only one member of the cast who actually is Albanian. See more »
Goofs
Why would the Albanians not gag Bryan? They even put a bag over his ex-wife's head. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
Murad:
He slaughtered our men, our brothers, our sons. The dead cry out to us for justice. On their souls, I swear to you. The man who took our loved ones from us, the man who has brought us such pain and sorrow, we will find him. We will bring him here. We will not rest until his blood flows into this very ground. We will have our revenge.
See more »
Crazy Credits
The last shot of the credits states: "The making and legal distribution of this film supported over 14,000 jobs and involved over 600,000 work hours." This is the first movie with such message of Fox campaign to educate consumers on economic impact of film and TV. Later on, other Fox-produced films are featuring this message. See more »
Alternate Versions
A Blu-ray has been released with both the Theatrical Version & a Unrated Cut along with an alternate ending and deleted scenes. See more »
Liam Neeson's action-man renaissance in 2008's "Taken" was a most unheralded critical and box-office hit for a seemingly generic revenge flick. Writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen managed to captivate audiences with a streamlined story of a retired CIA operative using his skills to locate and rescue his kidnapped daughter. It was a simple concept in that it utilized family bonds as motivation, but it was made exciting through a mixture of intriguing resourcefulness and crafty violence.
Everything about the story of "Taken" was so concrete, that there didn't seem like any obvious direction for a sequel, but a gross of $226.8 million on a $25-million budget talks, and so we have "Taken 2," but what Besson and Kamen have come up with this time fails to measure up to the original in almost every way.
This shouldn't surprise anyone considering, again, no justification existed in the original story for a sequel. Kim (Maggie Grace) couldn't just get taken again, and part of the intrigue was Mills (Neeson) having to find her despite being hours behind her captors with no idea of where they might take her. In "Taken 2," it's not as complicated and the stakes don't feel nearly as high.
Simply, the Albanians that Mills killed en route to finding his daughter want revenge, so they track him to one of his private security jobs in Istanbul. As it happens, Kim and her mother, Lenore (Famke Janssen), decide to surprise him by flying to meet him there, though to be fair it's not that obnoxious of a coincidence, as Mills had invited them to come after hearing Lenore's current husband had canceled their family trip to China.
During their first full day together in Istanbul, Kim gets the idea to let Bryan and Lenore have some alone time in hopes of rekindling their relationship, but when they go into town they are followed by the Albanians, and despite Mills' best efforts, he and Lenore are taken.
The entire setup here is forced — really forced. It feels as though every single plot point or detail exists solely to create circumstances in which our main characters can get kidnapped, with ample occurrences both inconvenient and convenient to allow for problems and general suspense while also providing enough room for a solution.
We already know what Mills is willing to do for his family, so his motivation is identical to the first film, plus we know he's too skilled to stay kidnapped for long. What's required to compensate for not raising the stakes in terms of both motivation and danger is substantially more creativity, and that's where Besson and Kamen really come up dry.
There's one scene early on (as in once the film gets going early on) in which Mills uses Kim to help pinpoint his location in the city, instructing her to set off grenades so he can figure out how far away she is by how long it takes for him to hear the blast. It's just a tease that the film might reach its predecessor's level, however, as the ingenuity never gets any more exciting than that.
Director Olivier Megaton, a frequent Besson collaborator, takes over for Pierre Morel, and does nothing to help nor hurt the picture. His style is a bit more frenetic as he heavily edits the action sequences to the point where you don't get more than a second and a half at any one camera angle, but that's not a problem so much as the film's failure through and through to prevent the audience's indifference to what's going on. We were given plenty of reason to doubt Mills' success in"Taken," but this time around we haven't a shred. There's a moment in which we think something might take a surprisingly darker turn, but it's over in a flash.
The script also attempts to be a bit more theme-driven than the first film, whether just because or in effort to compensate for its pointlessness. The father of one of the Albanians Mills killed (the infamous Marco from Tripoja), the "main bad guy" played by Rade Serbedzija, has a few conversations with Mills about taking the lives of family members and when revenge is or isn't justified. It's legitimate notion, but a bit out of place; we're asked to consider the feelings of the random European thugs who we normally see as killing fodder for our action movies. We don't care if you're someone's son — you're a tattooed meathead who deserves to be offed if for nothing but our amusement.
"Taken 2″ isn't offensively bad, just uninspired and unable to make the case for its existence. At 91 minutes, it's a harmless exercise in generic action filmmaking aimed at placating the folks who clamored to see more of one man's particular set of skills, even if they're the exact same skills applied in a less-than-spectacular manner.
~Steven C
Thanks for reading! Visit moviemusereviews.com
83 of 121 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?
| Report this
Liam Neeson's action-man renaissance in 2008's "Taken" was a most unheralded critical and box-office hit for a seemingly generic revenge flick. Writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen managed to captivate audiences with a streamlined story of a retired CIA operative using his skills to locate and rescue his kidnapped daughter. It was a simple concept in that it utilized family bonds as motivation, but it was made exciting through a mixture of intriguing resourcefulness and crafty violence.
Everything about the story of "Taken" was so concrete, that there didn't seem like any obvious direction for a sequel, but a gross of $226.8 million on a $25-million budget talks, and so we have "Taken 2," but what Besson and Kamen have come up with this time fails to measure up to the original in almost every way.
This shouldn't surprise anyone considering, again, no justification existed in the original story for a sequel. Kim (Maggie Grace) couldn't just get taken again, and part of the intrigue was Mills (Neeson) having to find her despite being hours behind her captors with no idea of where they might take her. In "Taken 2," it's not as complicated and the stakes don't feel nearly as high.
Simply, the Albanians that Mills killed en route to finding his daughter want revenge, so they track him to one of his private security jobs in Istanbul. As it happens, Kim and her mother, Lenore (Famke Janssen), decide to surprise him by flying to meet him there, though to be fair it's not that obnoxious of a coincidence, as Mills had invited them to come after hearing Lenore's current husband had canceled their family trip to China.
During their first full day together in Istanbul, Kim gets the idea to let Bryan and Lenore have some alone time in hopes of rekindling their relationship, but when they go into town they are followed by the Albanians, and despite Mills' best efforts, he and Lenore are taken.
The entire setup here is forced — really forced. It feels as though every single plot point or detail exists solely to create circumstances in which our main characters can get kidnapped, with ample occurrences both inconvenient and convenient to allow for problems and general suspense while also providing enough room for a solution.
We already know what Mills is willing to do for his family, so his motivation is identical to the first film, plus we know he's too skilled to stay kidnapped for long. What's required to compensate for not raising the stakes in terms of both motivation and danger is substantially more creativity, and that's where Besson and Kamen really come up dry.
There's one scene early on (as in once the film gets going early on) in which Mills uses Kim to help pinpoint his location in the city, instructing her to set off grenades so he can figure out how far away she is by how long it takes for him to hear the blast. It's just a tease that the film might reach its predecessor's level, however, as the ingenuity never gets any more exciting than that.
Director Olivier Megaton, a frequent Besson collaborator, takes over for Pierre Morel, and does nothing to help nor hurt the picture. His style is a bit more frenetic as he heavily edits the action sequences to the point where you don't get more than a second and a half at any one camera angle, but that's not a problem so much as the film's failure through and through to prevent the audience's indifference to what's going on. We were given plenty of reason to doubt Mills' success in"Taken," but this time around we haven't a shred. There's a moment in which we think something might take a surprisingly darker turn, but it's over in a flash.
The script also attempts to be a bit more theme-driven than the first film, whether just because or in effort to compensate for its pointlessness. The father of one of the Albanians Mills killed (the infamous Marco from Tripoja), the "main bad guy" played by Rade Serbedzija, has a few conversations with Mills about taking the lives of family members and when revenge is or isn't justified. It's legitimate notion, but a bit out of place; we're asked to consider the feelings of the random European thugs who we normally see as killing fodder for our action movies. We don't care if you're someone's son — you're a tattooed meathead who deserves to be offed if for nothing but our amusement.
"Taken 2″ isn't offensively bad, just uninspired and unable to make the case for its existence. At 91 minutes, it's a harmless exercise in generic action filmmaking aimed at placating the folks who clamored to see more of one man's particular set of skills, even if they're the exact same skills applied in a less-than-spectacular manner.
~Steven C
Thanks for reading! Visit moviemusereviews.com