Taken 2 Mediocre?

Rating: 3/10 (23 September 2013)

Olivier Megaton's Taken 2 puts the action back in an Action movie. He delivers extraordinary thrills with his impassioned fight scenes for an overall "adrenaline pumping" movie. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Taken 2 takes us familiarly back four years prior to its prequel , Taken, whereas the title implies, Bryan Mills' (Liam Neeson) daughter, Kim, is taken by Albanian sex traffickers. Taken 2's mirror like plot line does this with a slight (possibly original?) twist. Unlike its prequel, instead of Bryan finding Kim, Kim frees Bryan who then frees Lenny (mother). Even with great rebuke of the film's originality and predictable scenes, It can postulated that Megaton would be elated to know that somehow the fight scenes were still enjoyable and even did a good job of emitting the emotions that Bryan was feeling, to the audience.
Bryan, Kim and Lenny seem to pick up right where they left off from the prequel. Bryan is still a tough old man that you wouldn't want to mess with and is still divorced with his ex-wife, Lenny, who is again having relationship issues. While their daughter, Kim, is trying not to fail her driver's test for a third time while also, to her father's dislike, managing her first boyfriend. From this point on it's almost as if you watched the original taken, but with a few discrepancies here and there. The setting takes place in Istanbul, Turkey, where Bryan recently finished his three day body guarding job. In result of Lenny's current relationship problems, Bryan decides to invite both his daughter and ex-wife to a vacation with him. But guess whose back? No not Slim Shady, but Bryan's old acquaintance, Murad. He is back with great vengeance for the killing of his beloved son in the first movie. Murad realizes he has a great opportunity to get Bryan's whole family instead of just him. After Bryan catches onto what is occurring, the movie takes a four year trip back in time and picks up an oh so familiar plot. This is also when the predictable aspect of the movie kicks in and vaguely follows as so: some fighting, Bryan kicks some butt, slight disruption, along with some more foreseeable fighting.
One thing that an action movie can't go wrong with is fighting, along with the most important feature, more fighting. Although the movie is almost identical to its prequel, it is surprising how engaging the predictable combat scenes are. This is likely due to Bryan's bound and determined personality that he shows. He will take on three, even four men at once and always come out on top. Not only is this cool but it might leave the audience wishing their fathers were as "bad ass" as Bryan. Along with being engaged, it is refreshing how the character's emotions are oozed onto the audience during certain scenes in the movie. A specific scene that portrays this is when Murad shows a picture of his son that was killed by Bryan and tells Bryan how it is his fault that his son is dead. Now if you have seen the original Taken you know that Murad's son wouldn't be dead if they wouldn't have taken Bryan's Daughter. During this scene it is hard to express any emotions but anger, and will feed your hatred of Murad. This newfound hatred with the assistance of the "bad ass" mentality Bryan portrays is the only thing that will keep this movie from being a bust.
To conclude this substandard movie, not only is the plot fast-moving and the originality lacking, but because of this, it also made the movie boring because of how predictable it was. Yet somehow, is it reasonable to say that Megaton still came out with a mediocre movie?