Family matters
The original Taken was a film with a very particular set of skills — oppressively moody, inconsequential and often dumb, but boasting an immensely confident lead in Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson, Battleship) and a solid grasp of the cinematic language of action movies. And now, four years later, comes Taken 2, a movie that makes Taken look like Citizen Kane.
The story, once again, follows Neeson as his family is, once again, put in peril by, once again, some foreigners of dubious competence. Neeson, once again, has to go out and save his family by being a badass.
The problem is, Taken 2 is less a movie than a bullet-riddled carcass. It has, at best, a shaky grasp of geopolitics and, at worst, a jingoistic subtext. There’s a bit partway through the film in which Neeson kills several Turkish police officers, wrecks innumerable police and undercover cop vehicles and crashes through a damn embassy gate booth — and is somehow allowed back into Istanbul with a gun.
More troubling is Taken 2’s habit of asserting cultural superiority over decidedly foreign-looking villains. Nearly every opportunity is taken to portray the baddies as a group of backward simpletons with more collective evil than Adolf Hitler.
The movie would have us believe these people think organizing underground sex slavery rings is perfectly fine and morally justifiable. The movie then goes so far as to have Neeson explicitly condemn selling sex slaves to the main villain, only for him to promptly forget the lesson in the very next scene.
Despite its overwhelming stupidity and spectacular ineptitude in almost every meaningful regard, I still had a good time watching the movie.
OK, so I did not enjoy the shockingly-terrible pre-kidnapping segment of the movie — watching Maggie Grace (Lockout) imitate soap opera banter scored to an intensely dramatic orchestra recalls memories of watching The Room — but I did have a good deal of fun watching the second half.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes Taken 2 watchable. The director, Olivier Megaton (Colombiana), certainly has nothing to do with it. Every single cut in the movie is jarring, often obfuscating entire action scenes to the point of incomprehensibility.
The script is overly expository and the pedantic banter doesn’t help either. Nor do the frequent flashbacks to the infinitely superior Taken.
I think it all comes down to Neeson. That’s not to say his performance in Taken 2 is particularly good, but there’s something about him and this character that just works.
For inexplicable reasons, watching Neeson MacGyver his way through a legion of villains entertains, regardless of the racism and shoddy production values. At the end of the day, it’s just fun to see him outwit a group of terrorists with a rusted blade and half of a cell phone.
Then again, as those flashbacks helpfully remind us, there was much more of all this in Taken. Maybe you should just watch that again instead.
chzhang@umdbk.com
