
He's trying to remember where he put his car keys
dir: Oliver Megaton
Taken 2: The Takening? Taken Too? Taken 2: Achin’ for the Taken?
It was begging for a title worthy of parody, but they stuck with the prosaically functional. That’s a shame. If they’d had a sense of humour about it, perhaps they could have winked at the audience and made something functional a bit more fun. It’d be the equivalent of a dentist cracking jokes as he or she cracks into your jaw with shiny metal.
As it stands, Taken 2 is just about exactly the thing you expect it to be; another go-round of Taken. There’s even a bit which Liam Neeson has to say into a phone, replicating the same scene with minor alteration from the first flick, “Your mother and I are going to be TAKEN!” just in case we forgot what the fucking title on the ticket clenched in our sweaty hands was. He should have found a way to say, instead, “Kimmie, I’m about to be taken, and your mother is going to be Taken Too!” The expression on Liam’s face as he intones the actual dialogue is something along the lines of “no amount of money justifies having to say shite like this”, when it’s meant to be a look of consternation.
Liam Neeson looks even older and crankier than he did the last time, and who can blame him. To quote Bruce Willis from Die Hard 2: Die Harder, “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”
Very easily, it turns out, if the production company thinks there’s more money to be had going back to draw from the same well. And it’ll keep happening until the company, 20th Century Fox in this case, gives Liam Neeson permission to die.
For accuracy’s sake, they’re not just going back to the same well to draw water a second time: they’re revisiting the exact same bucketload of water to see what else they can get out of it without having to go to all the bother of bringing anything up a second time.
In the first film, we, as a global audience, thrilled at the idea of a nice Irish-American man killing a whole bunch of French people, Albanians and Arabs in the hopes of getting back his kidnapped daughter. He shot, greenstick-fractured, electrocuted, tortured, bludgeoned and otherwise exterminated a whole bunch of people who deserved no better treatment, no kiss on the forehead, no rose on the pillow the morning after, for their sheer awfulness. After all, despite their human trafficking and otherwise callous disregard for life, they weren’t nice people.
The thing that freaks me out about these films, and I forgot about it until this one started up, is that the main character’s name is Bryan Mills. I used to work for a guy called Bryan Mills. He hated my guts, and rightly so, since at the time I was a wretchedly terrible employee, and he found in me everything he hated about young people from the city. Utterly loathed me, and that never varied as time went on.
I’m sure he wishes he could have shot me or worse when I was late to work or used work computers to write stuff of a decidedly not-safe-for-work nature, but, thankfully, I am out of his sphere of influence now. Still, the name Bryan Mills conjures up (only for me) fearful possibilities.
In the first Taken, Bryan had to kill a whole bunch of Albanians. He didn’t really have a choice. I mean just look at the way they were dressed. At the beginning of Taken 2, the leader of that Albanian gang, and the father of one of the chaps Bryan totally murderised called Murad (Rade Serbedzijia) is burying the fallen. The bodies have been brought back to the village whose name played such a crucial role in the first flick, Tropoje ( I can just see a whole tourism industry springing up around the town after this instalment, just like in New Zealand after the Lord of the Rings films, well, maybe not). Murad vows, clasping the soil he’s about to throw onto his son’s coffin, that Bryan Mills will pay for his crimes.
It’s all a matter of perspective, innit? I mean, Bryan was just doing what he thought he had to in order to get back his daughter. So what if all the people he killed had fathers, sons, daughters, wives, mistresses, rentboys left behind to mourn their passing? So what if the people affected would want revenge themselves? It is of no moment what their crimes were, from the perspective of the vengeance seekers, that is.
When Murad has Bryan at his mercy, and yells at him in his awesome, heavily Serbian-accented speech that he doesn’t care what his son had done to Bryan’s daughter, that such a thing doesn’t matter to a father.
False equivalency much? In a way, the parallel would have been quite interesting, in that you have two fathers trying to do what they think is right because of their kids. On the one hand, there’s a crim mourning the death of his crim son, on the other hand there’s an aged (like fine wine) superspy who’s killed something like a hundred people, and shot some innocent people, just to get his way. In some ways it’s funny that he’s the hero, considering the death toll he’s responsible for. Plus, wait a second, doesn’t he kill an innocent cop too?
Spoiler, whoops, not that anyone cares. The format of this flick isn’t that different from the previous one, even with different particulars and a new city as the background. Most of this flick transpires in Istanbul (not Constantinople), which is a lovely backdrop, but, as backdrops go, it’s just some place to run around and shoot people in. The evil Albanians track him down there for their all-encompassing revenge, and, luckily, all three members of the family are there (despite the fact that Bryan and his wife Lenore have been divorced a long time). Way to plan ahead for something you could never have foreseen, champs. It’s an impressive outcome for a bunch of guys who dress like refugees from not only the collapse of Yugoslavia but also from the 1990s themselves.
When they come for them, Bryan is somewhat aware of something going on, but uncharacteristically lets his guard down to tiny degrees, but not enough to leave him completely defenceless. Because, let’s face it, the flick is twenty minutes long if he’s as super-competent as he was in the first movie. Here, he has to be super-competent only in spurts, to allow the flick to keep meandering along. In a way it rewards incompetence.
Once he’s captured, his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) becomes a lifeline to cling to, completely transforming her role as distressed damsel in the first flick. This allows for an entertaining if absurd sequence whereby she has to track his location down by the use of grenades, a shoestring on a map and an angry Turkish taxi driver later, she’s saving the day for him, and not the other way around. His ex-wife, on the other hand, is only there to groan and make things more difficult for him. Poor Famke Janssen. Does anyone remember when she was trying to kill James Bond with her thighs? Now she’s just mewling in the corner, waiting for someone to save her, barely able to get herself a glass of water.
Neeson seems to brusquely and begrudgingly take to the role like a pissed-off duck to water, but he’s starting to look less and less believable as this chap. In a sequence where he’s meant to be running through alleyways or along the famous rooftops of a great dirty old town like Istanbul (not Constantinople), he does it like an arthritic man in his sixties, which is I guess exactly what he is. Which is to say, he’s doing it pretty s l o w l y.
It’s still entertaining to watch him do what he does. Neeson is a compelling, brutish presence in these roles, and that’s what people are paying for, presumably, also for the thrill of watching a character kill people who threaten his family. His entire existence is an unlikely in this film as it was in the first, and the nick-of-time escapes make even less sense, but we believe him when he says what he does, because he does it with conviction. When he tells his daughter, who can’t drive that well, to drive at an armed roadblock at the US Embassy, and that they’ll survive despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary, well, she believes him and we have to believe him too.
That scene is probably the most ridiculous, in a way that only screenwriters from Europe could possibly write for Americans to act (yes, I’m not forgetting Neeson is Irish). But I didn’t care because he was running around Istanbul (not Constantinople), a town I love, killing motherfuckers dead. If it’s not as brutal and speedy as the first one, well, it doesn’t matter that much.
No-one in the flick is a match for him in terms of badassery, but then no-one came close in the first flick either, making it look like a titan striding around and slapping a bunch of little leaguers out of the way with his baseball bat full of awesome.
It’s a fleet movie which doesn’t outstay its welcome, and which delivers exactly what is expected, which really isn’t that much when you think about it. So, wait, I should probably be incensed about this. Nah, fuck it. Taken 2 is unnecessary, but it gets the job done in less than 90 minutes or your money back.
6 people want to know why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks of 10
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“If I kill you, your other sons will come and seek revenge.”
- “They will…”
“And I’ll kill them too.” – well then, you’ll have to kill their sons, and their son’s sons, and everyone who ever liked them – well, you’ll probably just have to kill Albania while you’re at it – Taken 2
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