Taken 2 - Movie Review

Starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Rade Sherbedgia and Luke Grimes.
Directed by Olivier Megaton.

★½

The first Taken had a visceral drive behind it.  His daughter was kidnapped. He didn't know who or why, but he knew he was going to hunt them down and kill anyone who got in his way, and it drove him all the way to an Albanian sex-slave ring.

This time around, he invites his ex-wife and daughter to join him on a vacation to Istanbul. Istanbul? I would think his daughter would never want to leave the US again after the events of the first movie, but why visit a country just a hop, skip and jump away from all those men he killed?  Yes, he has some business there, but why not say "And afterwards, we'll go to DisneyWorld!"

The father of one of the men he killed wants revenge, and he has dozens of henchmen at his disposal.  Unfortunately for him, they're the type of henchmen who sit around and smoke and watch futbol and don't notice the trained killer entering the room until it's too late.

Taken 2 feels like a straight-to-DVD sequel where they figured they'd get Wesley Snipes to do it, but then Neeson said no, he'll do it, so they rewrote it back to being him two weeks before shooting.  It's 92 minutes long, and it's not exciting. We never feel like he or his wife or his daughter is in real danger, but we know pretty much every unshaven Albanian we meet is going to get killed.  Neeson also is getting up there in age, and every fight scene is obviously chopped and edited to death.