Taken 2 Review

30th Sep 2012

Did you enjoy Taken? Then you’ll enjoy Taken 2. Review done.

I can feel the angry eyes of the editor burning me from afar, so I suppose I’d better give you something more to go on. So often with sequels, film-makers make the same mistakes: they take a winning formula which went down a storm with audiences and think “Hmmm, people seemed to enjoy that so we should give them a sequel which is completely different and tries to explore the metaphysical/psychological effects/his relationship with his father etc.” WRONG. They are WRONG. Thank heavens the gentle souls behind Taken realized that what we all wanted to see so very much was Liam Neeson punching, shooting and trashing his way through another cultural alien, this time the beautiful and clearly very forgiving Istanbul.

Well, I’m sure you can guess the set up: after the last round of massacre-ing, the film begins at a mass funeral in Algeria, with the wives/mothers/sons (no daughters, of course) of the ex-prostitute runners mourning their husbands/sons/fathers, seemingly having forgotten about all the terrible things they did in life, not to mention moving to another country on the other side of the world. Needless to say, the father of the guy who I’m going to affectionately refer to as Mr Sparks is oh so vengeful and will stop at nothing until the blood of the man who slew his son (Mr Sparks) “is running into this very earth”.

The film wastes no time in diving straight in. It is fairly short at just over an hour and a half, so the more screen time dedicated to Bryan doing “what I do best” the better. We are offered a brief domestic set up: Bryan’s ex-wife Lenor (looking very soft and fragrant) has split from her dweeby husband number two, and all signs point at a reunion between the two. Meanwhile, Kim is struggling to pass her driving test and has a boyfriend, with inevitably over the top and very funny reactions from daddy (I won’t spoil those for you). So to get away from it all, and with gay abandon, the family whisks itself off to the land where east meets west to get kidnapped and blow up as many civilian buildings as possible.

I’m not going to go into details about the kidnapping or the escape mechanisms, but I will point out a few choice highlights to look out for, including Bryan’s almost cold indifference to the after effects of a grenade, and an oddly compelling car chase in which we’re assured no animals or children were harmed.

What is most worthy of our applause is the attitude which everybody involved has ‘taken’ from the first film, which I’m almost certain was written as a serious action film. Whilst within the confines of the film there are very few laughs between characters, there is such fun being had off camera – everybody has really entered into the spirit of things, from the introduction to the film from Liam Neeson himself which is laced in self satirizing good humour, to the choice references to the first film cunningly snipped into the script. I swear there are moments when Bryan as good as winks at the camera before diving head first into some unrealistic yet simultaneously plausible get-out-of-jail-free scheme.

So it’s all fun and games, and very good fun it is. The producers have had the common sense to give the people what they want without tampering with it. If it’s not as good as the first film it’s because it unavoidably lacks the surprise factor which we can all remember so strongly, but short of Bryan having a memory wiper in that suitcase of his, that was always going to be the case.