Posted in: Movies | Tagged: action, famke janssen, liam neeson, luc besson, olivier megaton, taken, taken 2

Taken 2 – The Bleeding Cool Review

It seems only fair to warn you that I have never seen Taken.

It can still be worthwhile reviewing a sequel without seeing the original though. After all, the producers of the film must be hoping that at least a few new faces will be coming through the cinema doors.

A small percentage of the people who saw the 2008 original will inevitably have since died. An even smaller percentage may have been abducted by Albanian gangsters and are therefore unable to make it to the cinema. Just catering to the existing audience is the very essence of diminishing returns.

Now there are film franchises where I think it's absolutely essential to have seen the first instalment before buying your ticket to the second. Back To The Future and The Godfather are, I'd suggest, good examples of that. There are others where it doesn't matter too much: The Dark Knight maybe, or perhaps The Terminator. There are even a few franchises where skipping the first movie might be considered a bonus. I'm looking at you here, Star Trek.

So where are we with Taken 2?

Well, I think we're in 'helpful, but not essential' territory. Liam Neeson's borderline OCD badass superdetective Bryan Mills is outlined in the first few minutes. He doesn't kick any butts in the first reel but there is ample reference to butts previously kicked.

In fact, the first third of the film has a cosy Parent Trap sort of feel to it. Albeit the kind of parent trap where one of the parents is the guy who trained both Batman and Obi Wan Kenobi and the other one is the goddam Phoenix.

Don't worry though. The Parent Trap feeling soon gives way to more of a Frantic meets Die Hard sort of atmosphere. I didn't spot any scrap of dialogue that comes close to that oft-quoted imprecation from Pierre Morel's original. Instead Taken 2's most memorable moment is the strangest, funniest and most downright irresponsible use of a hand grenade in motion picture history.

There's a whole thesis to be written on the semiotics of weapons in action movies. Heroes tend to favour accurately fired semi-automatic pistols, I've noticed, with the odd smattering of pump-action shotguns. Villain spray and pray with the sub-machine gun and the assault rifle. Especially the classic banana-magazine AK47. You'll notice if you watch Taken 2 that even when ex-CIA killing machine Mills dispossesses one of the Albanian goons of his AK and turns it on the enemy, he soon drops it in favour of the 9mm again. No action hero superweapons for Liam.

This digression serves to illustrate my basic point. Fabulously named French director Olivier Megaton just doesn't inject enough sense of escalation into Taken 2. Plenty of things happen. There's a vertiginously edited car chase/driving lesson that is one of the best I've seen since The Bourne Identity. Neeson dispatches his adversaries with a methodical inevitability. The bad guys get their comeuppance and balance is restored. There's even the world's most ace one-of-a-kind mobile phone alongside the numerous Hollywood cliché iPhones and iPads.

But for such an traditional action movie property, which is essentially Die Hard On Holiday, to amble to Taken 2's rather perfunctory conclusion is…well..odd. It's as if they had a bloodier, more dramatic ending written and then backed away from it at the last minute.

I know that the first movie was trimmed for violence in cinemas and had some of the asskickery restored for its wildly successful DVD release. Taken 2 looked for all the world, in the cinema cut I've seen, like a great action movie edited for a daytime TV showing. By no means awful, but lacking that edge of brutal menace that Neeson's iconic speech in Taken promised.

Maggie Grace, a regular favourite of producer/writer Luc Besson, gets plenty to do here as she pays her Dad back for rescuing her in Taken with some rescue chops of her own.

Famke Janssen has less screen time, and significantly less action that Neeson and Grace. Even with a bag over her head though she's got a ton of that old fashioned movie star charisma and it fairly glows out of every frame she's in.

Taken 2 is a relentlessly efficient action thriller that depends heavily on the magisterial presence of Liam Neeson. If he's not in a shot, you can rest assured that he'll be along presently to shoot the person that is. It's not at all bad, I just can't help thinking that Luc Besson and Robert Kamen's script needed a gun-happy scripting genius like Steven De Souza to give it that push from 'businesslike' over into 'crazy'.

And, if you're as old as me, hearing Famke Janssen constantly referred to as Mrs Mills summons up one image, and one image only.

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