Taken 2 (2012)

User Review

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  Barneyonmovies

  5 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: The first Taken was a well-executed thriller with a brilliantly simple but highly emotive emotive central concept. Taken 2 on the other hand is almost exclusively held up by Liam Neeson who delivers a highly commited and engaging performance to make the tension and emotion in the script translate even when it's not there.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The reason the tension isn't there is because the narrative simply doesn't have the heft of before. The bad-guy revenge plot is simply squeezed from the original and has little merit on its own terms, and even the arguments it attempts to throw up about killing and saving lives, and those about the Neeson character's family, fall flat because the script is so clunky. That might all be excusable if the action was entertaining, but frankly it's so badly executed here that it's laughable. I mean seriously, how many cuts can you make within one fist-fight? Nothing even seems to be in sequence or to take place in one space, and the choreography itself is simply invisible because the camera moves around so much and no shot lasts more than five seconds. It's so bad that it's genuinely shocking it made it out like this, and it ultinately turns a fairly average action movie story into something utterly laughable.
  
  VERDICT: If it wasn't for Liam Neeson, 'Taken 2,' would be almost unwatchable. Its narrative is weak, its script is poor, but perhaps most shockingly, its action is so badly executed it's a wonder that it made it to the cinema like in its final form.

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