Unbelievable bad guys.

Rating: 3/10 (10 February 2013)

If I were Albanian, I would be thinking of organising some sort of boycott for the way my people are portrayed in this sequel to the well-made 2008 hit. Not because the movie portrays Albanians as criminals, but as bad criminals. Honestly, is this the best the casting director and scriptwriter could come up with? No scary dialogue, no scary people. Just thugs with AKs and Glocks. Okay, that's scary, but basically it's surprising they don't all shoot themselves in the foot. The chief baddie out for revenge because his son was killed in Paris just looks like a tired old man with a bad haircut. He spends must of his time sitting in an empty room. Inexplicably, he suffers from the Blofeld syndrome: once Neeson and his ex are captured, he talks too much while setting up the usual "horrendous death" scenario and actually leaves the room, allowing Neeson time to escape, coordinate his daughter's rescue, and contemplate lots of scenery. His henchmen look like gorillas in track suits. This is supposed to be the cream of the dreaded Albanian mafia? And the Turks, who are wary of Kurds so are no slouches when it comes to police work, look incompetent, corrupt and stuck with old, modified Ladas as police cars. Usually, it's a bad script that's the problem in a bad movie – and Lord knows this one is no Oscar contender – but here the problem is really casting. Not only are the crooks bad, the daughter (Maggie Grace) looks like she's aged 20 years since the last film. She's supposed to be about 18 or 19, in reality the actress is 29, and she looks like 39, or maybe 29 with too much partying. Back home, she can hardly drive in an empty parking lot with an automatic, having failed her driving test twice. In Istanbul, she steals a stick shift and can suddenly outclass a Finnish rally car champion – in Istanbul, mind you. How? Liam is in fine form and has improved his horribly fake American accent slightly (which was I think the basis for a Robot Chicken sketch), but even he looks a little long in the tooth for the action sequences, or maybe he's just a bit bored playing a role that he can do in his sleep, where he's not even called on to be outraged. The beautiful mommy and ex-wife Famke Janssen doesn't have much to do except suffer; there's some sort of inexplicable deus ex machine subplot with hubby number 2 leaving her as a prelude to cancelling a reconciliation attempt that was supposed to be a vacation, all as an elaborate scheme to explain how the mommy and daughter meet Liam in Istanbul where the Albanians track them down and get to work. In brief, none of the believable bad buys and outraged father of the original – Neeson is sleepwalking, despite the high octane action sequences, Janssen is mostly unconscious, and daughter Grace transforms from alienated mall girl to 007 as soon as she gets her hands on a grenade, which daddy Liam conveniently carries around. Any positives in this mess? Well, obviously these movies are well made in a technical sense, if you don't expect any sort of character-driven plot (there isn't any, not a shred, except the old Albanian's desire for revenge). The action sequences are fine. That's it. Sappy script, wooden acting, bad casting. Watchable, but barely.