Taken 2

Rating: 7/10 (10 August 2013)

"If the dog has a bone, the last thing you want to do is take it from him."
Well, a need for revenge exists in an Albanian mobster, Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija), vowing to get even with the man who killed his son. Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is in Istanbul, protecting a sheik, about to return to the States after performing his duty, greeted surprisingly by his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace) and ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), deciding to accept his invite to join him in Turkey for this temporary assignment. Murad and his men arrive in Istanbul with one goal, to kidnap Bryan and his family with plans to execute them all. Bryan is to be tortured and die miserably but not before seeing his wife hung upside down, a slight cut on her neck bleeding out as the rush to her head eventually leads to deaththat was Murad's plan anyway. Funny thing about fighting machines like Bryan Millsthey don't just go down according to plan.
The Turkish setting (the rooftops, streets, and old buildings) allows for some excitingly fresh environs, but I have to say that the story goes through the motions, with little time for Liam Neeson the actor to pull us into his emotional crisis. Because there never seems to be a fear that his wife or daughter will perish at the hands of Murad and his Albanian thugs, and Bryan leaves their potential for harm freed from his mind so he can equip himself with the resolve and mental functioning needed to rescue them, Neeson barely has time to even scratch the surface of his acting capabilities and convey the turmoil that should exist in such a dire situation.
I think the film's fundamental flaw, however, is the insistence to infuse Maggie Grace into the action; her driving the taxi cab through the populated (and narrow) streets of Istanbul like a trained stuntwoman (despite father's nagging about "speed up", "gogo..go", and "turn rightnow!"), leaping across rooftops like an Olympic champion, and successfully coordinating a perimeter based on Bryan's instructions without a hitch all seem questionable and hard to swallow. And the need for Grace to portray a teenager when she's nearly as old as me (she was born in '83 for crying out loud!), attempting to get her driver's license and dating a boy much to papa's chagrin, is really ridiculous.
While I loved watching Neeson go to work because it's "what he does best", I do believe this should be his second and final film in the role; seeing him with so little to work with (while Damon in the Bourne movies was equipped with some finely realized emotional scenes) was rather frustrating to me. It is cool, sure, to see him walk into a room of thugs and out, them dead in less than 45 seconds, but the film poster offers so much more than Neeson ever gets a chance to provide (sitting in a grueling slumped position of agony and exhaustion, having time to contemplate what's happened, the film doesn't afford him such a luxury). Janssen has a tiny bit of time to openly express her second marriage's crumbling to a sympathetic Bryan, but she's primary held captive in a room with Murad and others threatening her (Murad says he will send her back home in pieces), while Grace insists on helping Daddy get her back. Eventually though, the film allows Bryan to shake off his daughter and take care of the bad guys with his superior fighting skills (hand to hand combat and an exchange of gun fire) and quick reflexes. The film hums when we see bullets almost hit Bryan (who has just enough presence of mind to move in the nick of time) and Bryan use his surroundings as weapons of destruction. Walls and floors are unforgiving when Bryan bounces your body and head off of them with his swift accuracy and sharp martial arts skills. For whatever reason, though, the story itself (or the characters really) never quite match the scenes where Bryan annihilates his foes. It isn't a fault I could blame on Neeson, Janssen, or Gracethe situation they are flung into gives little time (besides hitting the basic points of where the characters are in their lives with seconds-long dialogue scenes) for character development. It becomes a matter of survival and rescue. The taxi cab car chase, leaving behind a lot of vehicular and city structural damage, is a doozy, though. Murad's son may've died horribly at Bryan's hands (thanks to a seated electrocution), but there's very little sympathy for someone kidnapping girls and sending them off to be sex slaves, so the revenge angle is relatively weak...it does give Bryan a reason to wipe out some more lowlifes, so I guess that's all that was needed. This film follows closer to the action films of the 80s where logic and realism take a back seat to bodies smashing and cars crashing, so that alleviates some of the impact an actor of Neeson's caliber can bring to Taken 2. Like others, I view this as a missed opportunity, but its strengths are exciting.