Entertaining, but a bit of a let-down for me.

Rating: Null/10 (23 February 2013)

I really like "Taken", I have seen it several times. But "Taken 2" is a bit of a disappointment for me. For one, it re-hashes in a sort of way everything Mills does in the first movie, using his superior training and experience to find the unfindable and to defeat any number of antagonists. And second, perhaps I am over-thinking this, but if his daughter already had been kidnapped in a foreign country, wouldn't he be more wary of taking her and mom to another foreign country, and take extra pains to assure their safety?
Anyway, Liam Neeson is back as Bryan Mills, his daughter has not yet passed her driving test, and that is an issue. Also the new boyfriend that Bryan has not been told about. But that aside, and his ex-wife is having some difficulties with her current husband, the daughter and mom get invited to join him in Istanbul. Just for some fun.
Maggie Grace is back as the daughter, Kim. And Famke Janssen as the mom, Lenore .
Of course there would be no movie if everything went smoothly. Instead the Serb father of one of the men Bryan had killed, the kidnapping mastermind, was following Bryan and his family to Istanbul, with the intention of kidnapping all three of them, then murdering them. But the story relied on Bryan's inventiveness to get free, then have his daughter explode some grenades so he could hear the sound delay and triangulation to have her find them.
Anyway it is all implausible but the "good guys" managed to come out on top. And Kim got plenty of driving practice in the stolen cab, evading police cars, so that when she got back to California she made a perfect score on her driving test.