Starring: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace, Rade Serbedzija

Directed by: Olivier Megaton

Today, I’ve just seen the movie, “Taken 2”. Liam Neeson is starting to be one of my favorite actors now. I’ve been seeing a lot of his movies in the theater lately. He makes a badass action hero, so I had to see “Taken 2”, since I loved the first one. On with the review:

Plot/synopsis: Bryan Mills (Neeson) returns and reunites with his family, Lenore and Kim, a year after the events in Paris. On a trip to Istanbul where Bryan currently lives, he gets a surprise visit from Lenore and Kim. Of course, their vacation in Istanbul does not go so well, when Bryan and Lenore was kidnapped by men who worked for Murad Hoxha (Rade Serbedzija) who is the father of the man who Bryan killed in the first film.

Some reviewers think this is close of a remake from the first movie, but I don’t think it is. The plot is different. The characters are the same yes, but it’s going for a different story here. Instead of repeating the same “oh no, the daugther’s been kidnapped”, which has already been done, why not have the main star of the film get kidnapped himself? I thought it was a good idea! I also thought teaming up Bryan and Kim together for action and try to help save Lenore, was very cool too! The Bryan and Kim team up felt like the TV show, “24”, a little bit.

As usual the action was a blast! You will see a mix of fist fighting, car chasing, explosions, and gun shooting all throughout the movie! It was an action packed ride for sure and I thought it had way more action than the first movie! In the first movie, Bryan Mills was the hero. They wanted to take this movie in a different turn, and make him look weak by kidnapping him. So he trains his daughter, Kim, to be the hero instead. So in reality, it was Kim who was the star of this movie. After the horrible stuff that Kim went through from the first film, the writers felt like it was a good idea to have her become part of the action. The action scenes were a little violent and graphic, similar like the first one. Bryan Mills wants to be a tough guy who takes no bullshit from anyone.

Some reviewers say the entire movie is much like the first one, which again I disagree with. They only took like one or two scenes from the first film I noticed. Like the one scene where Bryan has a cookout with his buddies, that was done in the sequel. Also, the one scene where he sneaks into a small room to kick some ass with a bunch of guys. That was about it. Other than that, the rest of the film was pretty original, from what I’ve seen. They just made a few scenes similar from the first, ’cause what if people haven’t even seen the first film? I can see why they did it. Not everyone have seen the first film, so they did it as a way to bring more people to the first one, in the film’s defense.

I thought “Taken 2” was great, it was just as good as the first one. There’s probably gonna be a Taken 3 ’cause Bryan said that Murad had more sons. It’s going to be even tougher to do a 3rd Taken movie ’cause Bryan, Lenore and Kim has already been taken. So who will they take next?

Score for “Taken 2” = *** = 3 stars as in (good).

Kev