Review: Taken 2

I don't really expect that much from action thrillers.  I know they require some significant suspension of disbelief - some more than others - and the plots are typically simple and straightforward.  Taken was a perfect example of this concept, using the idea of a man rescuing his daughter and running with it.  The final result was a really exciting thriller built around an interesting character for its hero.  Boom - instant hit.

So what happens with a sequel?  Why not do a fairly logical thing and take the family members of the bad guys from the first film out for revenge?  Then put Liam Neeson's Brian Mills on the run and trying to save his family from these other guys?  Makes sense, right?

I mean, there's no way this could suck.  It's a completely logical place to take a sequel for Taken.  There's no way to screw this up.

Or so I thought.

The film opens with a few bad guys who we don't know yet running around.  There's a funeral scene led by Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija), vowing to find out who was responsible for the deaths of his family members, including his own son.  Then we jump over to Los Angeles, where Brian Mills (Liam Neeson) is working on giving his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) driving lessons.  Mills has to leave for Istanbul for work for several days, and eventually invites his daughter and ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) to join him.

The first real flaw with the film is that all the opening exposition leading up to the climactic kidnapping takes over half an hour.  That's a huge chunk of a film that's just over 90 minutes long, so why all the needless time filler?  None of the stuff involving Kim's driving lessons or Lenore's issues with her current husband amount to anything, so these extra subplots could have been condensed to maybe 10 minutes instead of 30.

By the time we get to Istanbul, the bad guys close in on Mills and his family, and then the film shifts over to one massive action sequence after another.  Here lies the real major problem with the movie, aside from its various plot holes: every action sequence is shot and edited in such a way so that the audience has no idea what is in fact going on in the movie.  Mills gets into a fist fight when the bad guys first make their move on him, and I simply could not figure out how many guys he was fighting or who hit whom.  I think somebody broke out a cane of some kind to use as a weapon, and maybe Mills grabbed a hold of it to fight back.  Eventually things come to a stand still and Lenore is brought out as a hostage.  I defy anyone to adequately explain to me what exactly happened in this fight step by step, leading up to the standoff.

Later, Kim finds herself on the run from the bad guys too, and eventually runs across a series of rooftops to evade them.  I could not figure out just how far apart she was from her pursuers, which is pretty important to add tension in the film.  I had no idea which direction she was traveling either, or how far she was to her destination point.  

The same problems plague a car chase through downtown Istanbul.  I couldn't figure out who was chasing whom, how many bad guys in cars there were, or who got hit.  The most absurd example of this style of editing and directing involved a guy getting his head shoved into a wall, and then I assume he died.  I have no idea exactly what killed him based upon what was seen on screen, so I guess either it was a concussion or cracked skull maybe.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Taken 2 was directed by Olivier Megaton, who despite an awesome last name, cannot direct to save his life.  Michael Bay has a longer attention span than this guy, and that's saying something.  There were plenty of plot holes and faulty logic within the film that I won't even bother getting into since the film is quite literally unwatchable.  It's really disappointing that the sequel wasn't as equally surprising or entertaining as the original.