No more standin' there beside the walls,
I have got myself together baby,
I'm havin' a ball ..
It's official. Taken 2.
I mean really, who thought this was even an option?
If say, in 2007, someone mentioned a film about a tough-as-nails ex-military ops man whose daughter is kidnapped, forcing him to single handedly gun his way through swathes of armed foreigners to rescue her, you would stop them and say "Didn't Arnold Schwarzenegger already do that in 1985 as Colonel John Matrix in Commando?"
Absolutely he did. But the reason we all enjoyed Taken was that it took the done-to-death plotline and made it gritty and dark, if forgivably a little far-fetched.
Swap out Schwarzenegger in an assault vest to Liam Neeson in a leather jacket, give him some fucking badass dialogue and the job's a good one.
becomes:
But now the trailer for Taken 2 has been released, and everything the first one succeeded in looks about to be undermined, much like with The Hangover, by a half arsed rinse and repeat; all the key plot elements of the first film are taken, if you'll excuse the pun, and dragged kicking and screaming to scarcely believable proportions.
In this sequel, they're in Istanbul and it's the mother who gets kidnapped and it's up to Liam and his hot daughter to make the rescue this time round. In one scene from the trailer, we see the terrorists holding our hero at gunpoint, but still conveniently allowing him to make a crucial phone call to his daughter to inform her that they're "going to be taken".
"Listen to me carefully Kim. This sequel .. is probably gonna blow"
The other coincidental advantage is that the mother and daughter just seem to bump into Liam when on holiday in Turkey, just on the off-chance that at least one of them might get kidnapped. One can only really admire how well the daughter has recovered from the previous ordeal to even consider travelling abroad again. She's also seen perilously shimmying along a narrow balcony on the side of a building while scantily clad.
The balls on this girl!
The balls on this girl!
Tragically even the dialogue has been recycled, and any new stuff hasn't got a patch on the famous "I will find you. And I will kill you" monologue.
"What are you going to do?" asks the daughter nervously at one point.
"What I do best." growls Neeson. Cut to shots of him killing Albanians with bits of fluff he found in his pocket.
This isn't of course to say it's guaranteed to be a flop. Yes, there looks to be a fair amount of gun battles, car chases and Liam Neeson shouting "Where is she?" again, but not even that looks good enough at this stage to live up to it's predecessor.
Make it worth it, Liam.
Do it.
Do that for all of us.
Do it.
Do that for all of us.
I leave the final say up to you.
