Taken 2

Rating: 5/10 (9 October 2012)

Feeling listless in a lackluster season for cinema-goers, I simply yearn for the smell of the multiplex and it had been almost one month since my last visit, so TAKEN 2 has been singled out in view of that I had a mildly positive viewing from its first one (TAKEN 2008, 7/10), and action-packed thriller will at least not be a bore (a sad truth is that here is so difficult to find non-dubbed animation features, otherwise the selection would be much wider).
Being an emblematic sequel relying on the same gambit and stunts to pass through its running time, TAKEN 2 can hardly be called satisfactory, thanks to the rapid editing and effective camera rotation (another tact being overdone here), the gawky Liam Neeson still can render a patina of a sleek special agent, all his moves are pertinent and deadly fatal, nevertheless, reaching 60-year-old, perhaps his next invitation (apart from TAKEN 3, according to its groundbreaking first weekend bravura, a sequel is undoubtedly on the slate now) will be sent from Stallion's THE EXPENDABLES tawdries, and one thing is for sure, he will not be the oldest. Maggie Grace and Famke Jansen both have earned more screen-time, but hardly have any decent time to be composed enough to deliver some jolly one-liners.
The plain storyline has efficaciously implemented the genre fun in the most predictable manner (also an over-simplified one), for example, the special knacks (throwing the grenades among the shacks, counting the seconds to remember the route of the vehicle while being blindfolded) required to locate the whereabouts are too far-fetched since Istanbul is not a remote village and most of the time, the whole scheme is made deliberately to facilitate the film to justify itself, screenwriters (Besson is implicated) simply don't care much to the details and the suspense has never been concocted absorbingly, no matter how many Albanian villains are mercilessly iced by our hero, himself, his ex-wife and daughter's safety has never been severely endangered, so supposedly all the pleasure should be derived from the unnecessary killing of the ferocious but mostly marginalized Albanian avengers, what's the point then?
Director Olivier Megaton is an action genre journeyman (COLOMBIANA, 2011; TRANSPORTER 3, 2008, 4/10), but this time it's Luc Besson who has short-changed his followers afresh, and forebodingly this is not the last time.