Taken 2... I saw this action flick on the same day I watched Seven Psychopaths, and as impressed as I was with the dark comedy starring Colin Farrell, I was equally unimpressed with the new film starring Liam Neeson. Basically, Taken 2 was made solely to see Neeson do some fancy martial arts moves on hapless European bad guys...with a story and plot that wasn't given as much attention as the action scenes were. Along with the flawed premise that Neeson would have his family come with him to the one continent where his daughter (played by Maggie Grace) was kidnapped by Albanian sex traffickers in the previous movie, Taken 2 also had some unintentionally funny moments—most of them involving Neeson's wife (played by Famke Janssen). I should've tried counting how many times Neeson told Grace that her mother was "safe" in the film, despite the fact she's still in the lair where Neeson essentially left her to rot after making his own escape; her throat partially slit as she was being held by Albanian kidnappers.
Another laughable moment was towards the end of the film...when Neeson finally confronts the main villain (who's probably the weakest villain I've ever seen on the big screen) who arranged the plot to have Neeson eliminated to avenge the death of the bad guy's son in the first movie. Played by Rade Serbedzija, this bad guy cowered near the corner of a wall as Neeson tells him that he's "tired" of so easily dispatching all the goons that Serbedzija sent after him throughout the flick. (Neeson was basically an Irish Jet Li in the film.) Obviously realizing that he's an imbecile for trying to take revenge, Serbedzija's character listened as Neeson offered to give him mercy by merely walking away. Of course, with him being an imbecile and all, Serbedzija's character instead tries to shoot Neeson with the gun that the ex-CIA operative placed on the ground as a peace gesture. Needless to say, it doesn't end well for Taken 2's main baddie after that.
There are other flaws that I can point out (such as Neeson shooting a Turkish police officer in the movie and effortlessly getting away with it, and Grace buying ice cream with her dad immediately after passing her driving test... Um, I think you have to go back into the DMV office to get your interim driver's license printed out, first), but I'll leave it to the ones I pointed out in the previous paragraphs and the parentheses above. I wish Taken 2 could've been better...but hey, at least Neeson was genuinely awesome as Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, and training and then trying to kill Batman in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises. Can't win 'em all.
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