With Taken 2, Oscar nominee Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List) continues his string of lousy movies in recent years – The Grey, Unknown (which was more like “The Bourne Again Identity”), The A-Team, Clash of the Titans, and Battleship – and you have to feel a little embarrassed for him.
Taken 2 is a sequel to 2008’s Taken, which was an over-the-top and unrealistic yet spectacularly entertaining popcorn romp where ex-CIA super-spy Bryan Mills (Neeson) goes after a bunch of criminals who kidnap his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace, TV’s Lost) while she’s vacationing in Paris. It was the trailer that sold that movie where Bryan listens to Kim getting kidnapped on his cell phone and then calmly tells the kidnapper about his “particular set of skills” and will kill him when he finds him.
Taken 2 is like its predecessor in that it’s over-the-top and unrealistic – if not more so – but spectacularly stupid. The plot is implausible as relatives of the bad guys from Taken learn Bryan is in Istanbul, and is joined by Kim (who’s supposed to be a teenager, regardless that Grace is 29, and shows no signs of any psychological trauma she endured at the hands of her human trafficking captors from Taken) and ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen, the X-Men trilogy).
The bad guys capture Bryan and Lenore, so it’s up to Kim (initially wearing nothing but a bikini and a button-down shirt) to save them. How she locates Bryan is just simply ridiculous – so ridiculous that the audience was roaring with laughter. Bryan is in contact with Kim via a small cell phone he hid in his sock. You’d think with the body count he racked up in Taken, the bad guys would do a thorough job of frisking him and keep a guard on him at all times.
Kim frees Bryan and leads the bad guys on a merry chase through Istanbul behind the wheel of a taxi, Bryan riding shotgun (literally in his case as he trades bullets with their pursuers). Miraculously, nobody is hurt, which is impossible since at the beginning of the movie Kim couldn’t even pass her driver’s ed class. Once Bryan safely delivers Kim to the American Embassy, he goes after Lenore.
How he locates Lenore is even more asinine than how Kim located him. Yet he does it, leaving behind another trail of bodies in erratically cut fight scenes where it’s hard to fathom what one’s doing to the other.
There was no need to make a sequel to Taken, yet we shouldn’t be surprised if a Taken 3 is in the wings. If you want to see Bryan Mills again, watch the original Taken. If you want to see a good Liam Neeson movie, watch Schindler’s List, Rob Roy, Kingdom of Heaven, or The Chronicles of Narnia. Heck, even seeing Neeson in 1999’s awful Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is preferable compared to Taken 2.

GRADE: D–