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Film: Taken 2

Country: France

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Oliver Megaton

Screenwriters: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen

Starring: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace

♥½

Twenty minutes into a film I can usually – but not always – tell with a great deal of certainty whether a movie is any good or not. Sometimes 10 minutes is all it needs, and occasionally five minutes is enough to tell whether a film is a stinker or a masterpiece or somewhere in between. With Taken 2, 30 seconds into the first scene of dialogue was all it took.

I should stress that I’m not referring to production values here, which beyond a very basic level, are little indication of real cinematic quality. In Taken 2, the production values are fairly high, but this means very little. From its opening scenes onwards, Taken 2 is a very poor film indeed. The dialogue is so badly written that it never rises beyond the level of cliché and the storyline is banal beyond words, while the acting from Famke Jannsen is so utterly weak that the film would have to ascend to extreme heights of brilliance to recover. From the outset, the film is unconvincing on its own terms, even with the strong, gruff presence of Lliam Neeson, who really doesn’t have to do much to fill the screen.

Picking up from the first film – which I haven’t seen, but which, by all accounts, was a reasonably executed thriller – Taken 2 tells the story of divorced couple Bryan (Neeson) and Lenor (Janssen) and their daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who was kidnapped by Albanian human traffickers in the previous film. This time round, the Albanian kingpin is intent on getting revenge for the death of his son, who Bryan killed in the first film while rescuing Kim. As such, he’s set his heart on eliminating Bryan and his family, who are on holiday in Istanbul, vaguely reunited. And he begins, of course, by taking them.

Taken 2 is directed by Oliver Megaton and written and produced by Luc Besson, who really should know better. I’m quite fond of Besson’s work and he’s certainly added a handful of engaging films to the global cult canon. But as a screenwriter, without the benefits of being able to direct that writing, he is nothing short of atrocious. In fact I don’t think I’ve heard such empty and unconvincing dialogue is many years. It’s not so much clunky as utterly generic, with literally every phrase and every scene having been stolen from the western film library of familiarity. And if you’ve seen the trailer for Taken 2, you’ve seen everything in the film that is of any value.

Beyond the obvious flaws – although the word ‘flaws’ might suggest that there’s something worthy at the centre – I found Taken 2 to be disturbingly racist and profoundly amoral. While the villains are hypothetically Albanian, what they are really, to use a blunt and nasty phrase from our own distressing history, is non-white, and as such, all of them get killed off one-by-one like so much digital fodder in a shoot-em-up computer game. Only the Americans are granted full humanity. And at the end of the film, when the family is reunited in an American diner (there’s no doubt at any point that they’ll survive, and the film is so empty, vapid and unsatisfying that for once I really don’t care if I’m spoiling the plot for anyone), there’s absolutely no trace of a series of events that would have left real human beings in a state of trauma, possibly for years to come.

Of course, we don’t expect the movies to perfectly mirror real life – that’s one of the reasons why we head into the dark to lose ourselves for 90 minutes or so. And neither do we necessarily expect films to be plausible. But when things are this ludicrous, this lazily executed, this full of holes, we lose all sense of having lost ourselves. We are simply too aware that we are watching a piece of unconvincing fiction.

The real tragedy, though, is that there’s a market for this gumph when so many excellent films never achieve global distribution. The production of Taken 3 has already been announced and the film will be making its way to our screens in the next year or two. Luc Besson will once more be writing the screenplay. I will not be watching it.