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Or it could be because crucial shots have been excised to secure a 12A rating (the original was 15, with an 18 director's cut).
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It might be to disguise the fact that Neeson, who’s just turned 60, isn’t exactly Jet Li. Time and again Mills faces off against foes, only for the resulting scraps to unfold so confusingly - thanks to shakycam, overcranking and merciless strobe-cuts - that it appears he’s editing people to death. Instead, it retains all the twitchy xenophobia of the original - sending the all-American, occasionally-Irish-accented Mills to Istanbul, another foreign city seemingly lousy with lowlifes - while dropping the ball on all the OTT action that made Taken so much fun.īlame must be laid at the feet of director Olivier Megaton (the man behind Transporter 3 and Colombiana, replacing Taken’s Pierre Morel), who has an excellent name but fists of ham when it comes to lensing combat. Sadly for those fans, Taken 2 fails to go bigger, badder, better. Instead it made $227 million worldwide, turned him into a late-in-life action star and made the sequel an inevitability. No-one was more surprised than Neeson himself, who recently admitted he’d expected it to go straight to DVD. The kind of guy who secretly installs a GPS chip in his daughter’s phone, and who thinks a karaoke machine will make a brilliant birthday present.Īll these qualities earned Mills, as played with pleasingly poker-faced intensity by Liam Neeson, a large following when Taken came out in 2008. At heart he’s a worrywart, constantly fretting about his family’s safety but mostly embarrassing them in the process. Yet there’s also an endearing awkwardness that sets him apart from all those other one-man armies.
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Not to mention his very particular set of skills, which make him a nightmare for anyone foreign and in need of a shave. He’s a taciturn, leather-jacketed super-soldier-turned-bodyguard who begins 70 per cent of his sentences with the words, “Listen to me very carefully.” He’s killed more people than you’ve had hot dinners, and probably some of them with hot dinners. It’s been established that she’s failed her drivers’ test several times, but somehow Kim whips through traffic like a seasoned stunt driver, and with a stick shift, no less.At a time when iconic action heroes are few and far between, Bryan Mills stands tall - and not just because he’s 6’ 4”. The film’s centerpiece involves Kim driving a stolen taxi through Istanbul while Bryan shoots at pursuers as police cars chase after everyone. After that, Bryan’s strategy for pinpointing his location involves having Kim set off grenades all over the city - because, you know, who would notice? First, he has her hide in a hotel room closet, and only through sheer luck do the would-be kidnappers avoid opening the door and grabbing her on the spot. While Bryan’s “particular set of skills” made him such a memorable bad-ass in the first movie, his advice to Kim this time around seems less than professional.
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#Taken 2 movie review how to#
Murad and a new group of Albanians (the only identifying characteristic the movie gives them is to make them swarthy and Muslim) turn up to kidnap the entire clan, but after they grab Bryan and Lenore, Bryan manages to warn Kim and tell her how to avoid the bad guys and aid in the rescue of her parents. Unaware that Albanian crime boss Murad (Rade Serbedzija) has sworn revenge on Bryan for gunning down Murad’s son and other goons from the same village in the first movie, Bryan invites Kim and his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) to join him on a trip to Istanbul. Liam Neeson returns as Bryan Mills, the former CIA agent and overprotective dad who rescued his virginal daughter Kim (the vapid Maggie Grace) from the clutches of evil brown men in the first film.