Where do I begin? Perhaps with the population of Istanbul.
According to Wikipedia, 13.5 million people live in Istanbul, the economic and cultural heart of Turkey. This makes the scene in “Taken 2” in which a young American woman runs through a residential district of the city lobbing grenades so her father can use the sound of the explosions to guide her to him unlikely. Where are the people who live there? Why are neither the father nor the daughter concerned about their welfare? And most curiously, why do the police never materialize?
The answer to all of the questions one might ask about the sheer disregard for logic in “Taken 2” is simple: The guy who wrote it must have stuck his finger through his eye, stirred it around in his brain and then sat down to pen the screenplay. The movie makes that much sense.
Take the villain, Murad Krasniqi, for example. Here is a man who kidnaps people, hooks them on drugs and then forces them to serve as sex slaves. Yet the notion that someone would kill his son outrages him, and he cries for justice. Never mind that the killer, Bryan Mills, was merely rescuing his daughter, whom the son had kidnapped.
In “Taken 2,” Krasniqi sets out to exact revenge on Mills for the events that took place in “Taken.” When he learns Mills will be in Istanbul on a private security job, he hatches a plan to kidnap, torture and kill not just Mills and his ex-wife and daughter.
Now, since Mills is an ex-CIA agent with immeasurable skills, what would you do with him once you’d captured him? Tie his wrists to a pole and leave him unattended? Apparently, Krasniqi didn’t watch “Taken,” in which Mills escaped the same kind of incarceration in a room FULL of bad guys.
For all of his smarts, Mills also makes questionable decisions. Before being taken, he calls his daughter, tells her men are coming to abduct her and instructs her to hide in a closet in their hotel room. He then calls her while she’s in the closet, causing her phone to ring. Liam Neeson, who plays Mills, should have objected.
Throughout the movie, characters escape situations and do things no one would be able to do in real life, let alone in a decent movie. Is this due to contempt for the audience, or the result of lazy writing? I don’t know.
Director Olivier Megaton didn’t know, either. I use the word “director” loosely because he failed to produce a single moment of coherent action in “Taken 2.”
Megaton used the nauseating “shaky cam” technique when shooting the movie’s fistfights, shootouts and car chases. Then, concerned a constant blur didn’t render the action unwatchable, he cut each shot down to a fraction of a second and then removed frames to give them a jerky look. As a result, all you see are limbs being thrown; you never actually see someone land a blow or pull off a slick move. Worse, there’s no clear progression to the fights. Two men encounter each other, there’s an arm swinging, there’s a leg kicking, and then one of them is on the ground.
I would’ve forgiven the poorly shot action if the in-between stuff had engaged me, but despite the life and death nature of the events on the screen, there’s no tension. Even in its climactic moments, “Taken 2” has no more of a heartbeat than the corpses Mills easily leaves in his wake.
Despite all of these issues, my biggest complaint about “Taken 2” is the way it plays into the current wave of xenophobia in our country. If we’re to believe this movie, Europeans are murderous thugs who live only to kill Americans in the most inhumane ways, and no American in his or her right mind would set foot in the Middle East. I imagine the tourism board in Istanbul is very unhappy with “Taken 2.”
I’m just glad I made it out with my love of film intact.
Rated PG-13 for violence and some sensuality. One star out of four. Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.