Taken 2 is excremental remains of an amazing movie.

Rating: 3/10 (11 October 2013)

Taken was like a rare dish served in a respective restaurant cooked by a prestigious chef. You enjoyed it a lot and there were few complaints but, it was so good that you overlooked the minor flaws. The dish went down to your stomach where digestive juices started attacking it to break down the delicious dish for nutrients. The dish then travelled through your small intestines where it's further broken down to individual molecules and absorbed directly to your blood stream. Taken 2 on the other hand is the remains of that dish pushed up and around the large intestines and exiting from your anus.
I was excited to see Liam Neeson return to his kickass dad role and do what he did so suavely and almost nonchalantly in the first movie: take no names and kick some unknown gang member's ass. However, this movie had me greatly disappointed. The movie tried its very best; it had a great premise in that the family of the gangsters from the first movie comes to Istanbul to take revenge on Bryan Mills (Neeson) for killing fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. But sadly that's the furthest the movie went with this great plot point. The antagonists were very generic, they were horribly unoriginal, and were Muslims which I'm assuming made it easy for us to hate.
This wasn't a huge issue in the first movie where the antagonist were also Muslim, but the movie didn't take every moment to remind us that. It hinted it, and I respected it for that. It was just happened to be a gang of Albanian kidnapers and that's all they had to say. Rest was just history. Liam Neeson kicked some ass, shot and tortured some goons, and I was a happy camper. Taken 2 on the other hand wanted us to know that these guys are maleficent and they are Muslims and the good American hero is out there fighting on their turf to defend his family. I would have over looked this, if only the movie was even remotely as good as the first one. The antagonists seem smart at the beginning of the movie but they quickly became your generic brand hired thugs that can't shoot, and do everything haphazardly. They were very easy to kill and showed very little to no intelligence. Just a side note; why in God's name the Albanian gangsters in Turkey talking to each other in English? It boggled my mind how stupid this movie got at points.
The fight scenes were absolutely horrendous, and were grossly edited. There wasn't a single sequence of continuous fighting. The camera was shaky and you would only get to see a bit of a fight scene because of heavy editing. Apparently they didn't have a good enough budget to hire a fight coordinator but they had enough money to hire a stunt driver to show off amazing driving skills through the narrow streets of Istanbul of a girl who failed her driver's test twice.
Liam it seems was trying his best, but the movie was so bad that only his performance from Schindler's list would be able to save this pile of excrement. His co-stars didn't really shine either. That's all I have to say about it. Any further details are irrelevant because it so bad I have nothing to say. Their acting was just awful. Both the wife and daughter played by Famke Jenssen and Maggie Grace, were just there as an eyesore. They didn't really add anything to the movie they didn't provide any added excitement, and it was a good reason to only show them for first few minutes of the first movie.
This movie would have been so much better if the bad guys had some depth, if it had some decent fight scenes and much less screen time for the leading ladies. I say don't waste your time go watch The Raid Redemption instead.