If someone were to tell me five years ago that Liam Neeson would be an action hero, I never would have believed it. I’d always held him in high regard as an exceptional actor who brought a unique presence to his roles. From his Oscar-nominated turn as the title character in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1994), to the Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999), he had also proved himself to be incredibly versatile. Even so, it was hard to imagine him as an action star.
But in 2008, I was gladly proven wrong. That’s when he starred in Taken (Pierre Morel) as Brian Mills, an ex-CIA operative who must single-handedly rescue his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) when she is kidnapped by Albanian sex-traffickers in Paris. The gritty, hyperkinetic thriller was a breakout hit, adding a new facet to Neeson’s already impressive resume. Over the next few years he would have starring roles in The A-Team (Joe Carnahan, 2010), Unknown (Jaume Collett-Serra, 2011), and The Grey (Carnahan, 2011), cementing himself as one of the most bankable action superstars in cinema.
In Taken 2 (Oliver Megaton), Neeson returns to the role that redefined his career. While vacationing in Istanbul, Brian and his family are thrown back into the waking nightmare when Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija) – the father of a kidnapper whom Brian killed in the process of tracking Kim down – aims to get retribution by abducting the family, including Brian’s ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen).
The focus of the first film was about a man’s solitary quest to recover his daughter. It was an allegory for the lengths that a parent will go to in order to protect their child. The only drawback to this was that Kim was one-dimensional. Her kidnapping was the catalyst for the action, but beyond this her character didn’t serve very much purpose. We never really got to see how she reacted to the situation. It’s all about how the abduction affected Brian, who became a singularly-driven killing machine to save her life.
Taken 2 could have very easily rehashed the plot of its predecessor, with Brian again springing into action as a one-man-show to recover his loved ones. Thankfully the sequel takes a different approach, focusing on how a family deals with such a terrifying ordeal.
There’s a bit less room for the hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners tactics that drove the first film. A gritty visual style is retained, but what we get here is more large-scale action, including an exceptional car chase that is a vast improvement over that of its forerunner. The brutal fight and torture scenes are still there, albeit in a diminished capacity.
The film’s rapid-fire editing may prove a bit too frenetic for some. However, unlike lesser pictures whose quick cuts make certain scenes incomprehensible, the action here never suffers this problem. It’s enough to give the movie a jolting punch, but not so much that it becomes an exercise in sensory bombardment.
Like the first movie, Taken 2 understands what kind of film it is, never overreaching. Its simplicity is its strong suit. The plot isn’t muddled up by having Brian try to bring down the criminal organization behind the kidnappings. He seeks to save his family, nothing more and nothing less. This keeps the story tight and focused, which draws us into the sordid underworld that Brian and his family are forced into.
We never do feel the same thrill as we did in the original. It isn't a strictly formulaic exercise in futility, though it's far from the thinking man's action film. In the end, we can be grateful that Taken 2 is a movie that delivers exactly what it promises.
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