The Reel Critic: Taken 2

Because the position of reel critic is tenured to ensure public opinion does not hinder free thinking, I loved Taken 2. I’m aware that the movie’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes stands at a firm 18 percent (the image of rotten tomato particles next to the figure emphasize this), but in spite of this fact, I think it might be worth the price of admission.

Even though I enjoyed the film, I don’t disagree with people who said it was a bad movie.  There are essentially two ways of viewing the film. The first way involves using your mind; if you’re too analytical when you watch the movie, you’ll get caught up in the many non sequiturs that plague it, like the minor detail that Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), blind-folded and bound in the back of a van, can track the distance from his hotel in Istanbul by listening to the clicks of his watch and vague sounds he hears outside that spur vivid images in his mind of locations he has been to maybe once. I’m not kidding.

The second way of viewing the film is to watch it with your heart. This sounds corny, but it is the secret to watching most “bad” movies and makes this picture much more enjoyable. I believe anyone can watch the film from the second perspective if they try. Really, you only need to take a few things into consideration before viewing Taken 2. Realizing these things will relax your mind and put your gut in control, making it practically impossible to take the film too seriously. First off, the movie isn’t really about anything except Liam Neeson.

Director Oliver Megaton knows the key demographic of 18-35 year-old males wants to see as much Liam Neeson in 24 frames per second as can be managed. If this means making other characters uninteresting at the expense of getting him more screen time, so be it.

Second, you need to give Liam Neeson’s character a break. All action movies  let their heroes escape from hairy situations against all odds. Also, the fact that he has cool gadgets of all sorts is a feature in many films, from the Mission Impossible movies to The Cat in the Hat.

Perhaps the most useful thing to realize about Taken 2 is that the basic premise of the movie assumes you have amnesia. (This same assumption fueled the creation of five Final Destination movies) The first Taken, even though it incorporated all of the action movie clichés in existence, rocked because the plot was very basic but engaging: Liam Neeson’s daughter gets kidnapped in Europe so he sets off to kill the people who did it.

With this strong motivation, we can forgive some of the film’s absurdities.

The problem with the Taken series is that any sequel has to involve the kidnapping of a member of Liam Neeson’s family or else the film seems unrelated.

Maybe they’re just unlucky, but after a while the family just starts to look bad: How many times can a member of the Mills family be kidnapped? Three?