The tagline on Taken 2 promises a reversal: “First they took his daughter. Now they’re coming for him.” That is the pitch, and it is also the problem. Olivier Megaton’s sequel takes the premise of the 2008 original and moves it to Istanbul, where the man who did the taking becomes the man who gets taken. It runs 91 minutes.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios UK.
Bryan Mills Lands a Security Job in Istanbul
The setup is brisk. Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) has finished a three-day security job for a wealthy Saudi Arabian sheik in Istanbul when his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) surprise him with a visit. The reunion does not last. Murad Hoxha (Rade Šerbedžija), the father of Marko, one of the men Mills killed while rescuing his daughter two years earlier, wants payback. Murad’s men grab Bryan and Lenore off the street. Kim escapes by hiding in a hotel closet while the kidnappers shoot two security guards and flee.
That is the engine of Taken 2: a man who spent an entire movie hunting captors now has to escape them. It should be a mirror. Instead it is a smaller, dimmer copy of the first film.
The Grenade on the Rooftop
The most inventive stretch of Taken 2 puts Bryan zip tied to a pipe in an empty basement with a miniature cellphone hidden in his sock. He calls Kim, tells her to alert the American embassy, and she talks him out of it. She opens his equipment case, takes a grenade, and detonates it on a nearby rooftop. The sound gives Bryan a reference point, and he walks her through triangulating his location.
It is a clever bit of staging, and in this paper’s view it is the only sequence in the film that generates real tension. A phone call as a map. A daughter as a pair of ears.
Then the film cuts back to the basement, where the terrorists bring in Lenore, make a small incision in her neck, and hang her upside down to bleed out. Bryan frees himself, then her, and the movie returns to running and shooting. The grenade trick is a high point the rest of the runtime cannot reach again.
Murad Hoxha Wants the Man Who Killed His Son
Murad Hoxha is the sequel’s biggest structural gamble, and it fails. The first film’s villains were a kidnapping ring; the second gives us a father who lost a son and wants the man responsible. Šerbedžija has the face for it. But the script, by Robert Mark Kamen and Luc Besson, never lets him be anything more than a grievance in a coat.
His plan is also strangely laborious. He flies to Paris and goes after a man who once worked for France’s external intelligence service, the DGSE, and later became a crooked officer in the National Police. Murad has that man’s business card, recovered where Marko died. He tortures him for answers and comes away with nothing. He then pays a corrupt police official for the man’s files, and from those files works out two things: that his old friend Bryan Mills is the one responsible, and that Mills is on holiday in Istanbul. That is a lot of legwork to arrive at the premise the trailer already sold you.
Meanwhile, the supporting cast is stranded. Leland Orser returns as Sam Gilroy, D. B. Sweeney as Bernie Harris, Jon Gries as Mark Casey — all of them orbiting the plot without touching it. Luke Grimes shows up as Jamie. Kevork Malikyan plays Inspector Durmaz. None of them get a scene worth remembering.
The Action Has No Sense of Space
The sequel moves to Istanbul and does little with it. The city is a series of rooftops, alleys, and hotel corridors that could be anywhere. Megaton shoots the action in a choppy, close-cropped style that makes the geography hard to follow and the chases hard to care about.
That is the central failure of Taken 2. It is an action film with no sense of space. When Bryan runs, you do not know where he is running to. When he fights, you cannot see the fight. The grenade sequence works precisely because it is the one time the movie slows down and explains itself.
Neeson does not phone it in. He plays Bryan with the same weary competence as before, and the scenes with Grace have a warmth the rest of the film lacks. But the material gives him nothing new to do.
A $376 Million Sequel With Negative Reviews
Here is the strange fact at the center of Taken 2. It grossed over $376 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing installment of the Taken trilogy. It also received negative reviews from critics. Those two things are not in tension; they explain each other. The first film was a hit. The second assumed the audience would show up regardless of what was on screen.
They did. And what was on screen was a 91-minute retread that swapped a kidnapping ring for a grieving father and a daughter in peril for an ex-wife in peril, without improving on either. The trilogy continued anyway: Taken 3 arrived on 9 January 2015.
Kim Mills Should Have Been the Lead
In this paper’s view, the first Taken worked because Bryan Mills was a force of nature — a specific skill set, a specific target, a specific clock. The sequel turns him into a man who gets captured in the first act and spends the rest of the movie undoing that capture. That is a downgrade in kind, not just in degree.
A revenge story needs the avenger to be formidable. Taken 2 makes its hero a hostage while his daughter drives the rescue. Kim’s arc is the most interesting thing in the film, and the movie does not seem to notice. It keeps cutting back to Neeson.
There is a version of Taken 2 where Kim becomes the protagonist, where the sequel passes the skills from father to daughter. That version is not this one.
The Numbers Behind Taken 2
- Title: Taken 2 (2012)
- Director: Olivier Megaton
- Writers: Robert Mark Kamen, Luc Besson
- Runtime: 91 minutes
- Genres: Action, Crime, Thriller
- Tagline: “First they took his daughter. Now they’re coming for him.”
- Cast: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Rade Šerbedžija, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, D. B. Sweeney, Luke Grimes
- Release dates: 3 October 2012 (France), 5 October 2012 (United States)
- Box office: Over $376 million worldwide
- Critical score: 4.5/10 (Metacritic 45/100)
- Sequel: Taken 3, released 9 January 2015
Taken 2 is unnecessary. The grenade triangulation is a real idea, Neeson is still watchable, and 91 minutes is a merciful length. But in this paper’s view the villain is a motive without a personality, Istanbul is a location without a geography, and the action is cut so tightly it stops being action and becomes noise.
The tagline sells a reversal — the hunter becomes the hunted. The movie delivers a hostage crisis with a clever phone call in the middle. That is not a sequel. That is a rerun with a new address.
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