Trailer

Six Things I Learned from Taken 2:

1. Randomly chucking grenades around in a crowded city is the best way of gauging someone’s location.
2. American citizens are free to kill random, innocent police officers provided one of their mates has contacts at the American Embassy.
3. Typing “US Embassy” into the GPS works every time.
4. Slamming the gearstick of a taxi down will make it go faster.
5. Albanians speak English in their own country but speak Albanian in Istanbul.
6. It takes less than three weeks, and no therapy, to get over a truly traumatic experience.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg...

Now, of course I didn’t wander into this film expecting a logical…

Slight spoilers, nothing too crazy. This is the official breakdown of why Taken 2 is true cinematic genius.

Taken 2 is the beautiful and tragic story of a man named Bryan Mills. A man who just wants to be normal. As we all know, at the start of Taken 1, he is disconnected, unloved for the fact that he's a killing machine with little humanity, yet all he wants to do is love. When his daughter is kidnapped, he is given the chance to be useful, to prove himself, and kills most of paris to get her back, to prove, in the way only he can, that he loves her more than anything.

Unfortunately, because he's a murderous monster who…

I am shocked and amazed that this film isn't called Taken Too. Mainly because the film they've created is deserving of a tacky title like that.

Luc Besson is a peddler of pulp. Most things he writes are instantly forgettable and sometimes enjoyable pulp. With Taken he did something very clever. He wrote a pulpy and gritty actioner with two surprises. One Neeson's character (clearly written with him in mind) and two the plot. See, when you shake things up considerably at the half way point you keep your audience guessing and that combined with the coolness of the protagonist provides entertainment and elevates an otherwise generic action film to the realms of coolness.

With that in mind the sequel,…

The original Taken was a back to basics no nonsense action thriller that turned Liam Neeson into a surprising action star. As enjoyable as the first film was there seemed little room, or need, for a sequel without clumsily rehashing the central conceit. Rather than rehashing the kidnapping from Pierre Morel’s propulsive thriller it has reversed it with Bryan Mills being the one who is taken and his teenage daughter sent to find him. Sounds terrible, right? Well it is.

With Pierre Morel jumping ship (probably when he was told the film’s premise) it is up to Besson regular, Olivier Megaton, to take control of this would-be franchise. Anybody unfortunate enough to sit through Transporter 3 and Colombiana will know…

Title: Taken 2 (2012)
BD-50 Dual-Layer Disc / 2 Disc Set
Video: 1080p / AVC
Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, and Mandarin
Run time: 98 minutes
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Rating: Unrated
Region Coding: Region A Locked

Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills
Maggie Grace as Kim
Famke Janssen as Lenore
Leland Orser as Sam
Jon Gries as Casey
D.B. Sweeney as Bernie
Luke Grimes as Jamie
Rade Serbedzija as Murad Krasniqi
Directed by Olivier Megaton

Megaton is not a well known director, but he does have a knack for making decent mindless action/thrillers. Taken 2 is certainly no exception to this and it loses quite a bit of the allure found in the…