Taken was a dumb-ass movie, but the fun of watching Oscar nominee Liam Neeson lower himself to the level of Eurotrash action made it worth seeing. Since then he’s taken on a good half-dozen such roles and, while the cheap thrills remain, the novelty is gone.

This sequel opens with an Albanian funeral. A father (Rade Sherbedgia) swears revenge on the American CIA operative who murdered his son — electrocuted, precisely, in Taken’s most infamous scene — and, what luck, that man and his family are soon to vacation in nearby Istanbul. We meet, again, Bryan Mills (Neeson), his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and their teenage daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who doesn't look a day under 30.  

It doesn’t take long for Sherbedgia and his crew of anonymous thugs to track down the Mills family, abduct the parents and whisk them off for a gritty torture session. Astonishingly, the captors leave them alone at precisely the wrong moment to, I don’t know, get lunch or something, and Neeson breaks free. Even more astonishingly, he leaves the barely conscious Lenore to spend the rest of the movie in PG-13 peril.

Until that point, Taken 2 had my interest. Neeson and Grace share a genuinely clever scene wherein, over the phone, he helps her pinpoint their holding location with a map and some shoelace. But after he breaks free and starts kicking ass, the movie loses all semblance of suspense. Director Olivier Megaton (he gave himself that surname) directs action set-pieces with a complete lack of spatial sense. No matter how loud and fast a car chase is, if I can’t actually tell where the cars are relative to each other my mind drifts to post-screening meal options.

The lack of invention in sequels like Taken 2 is confusing. Since you’ve already got a hook for fans to come back to the theatre, wouldn’t it be the ideal place to try something new, test the boundaries of your concept? It seems like giving fans nothing more than exactly what they except is the new standard.

Director: Olivier Megaton

Fox Films, 92 minutes
Rating: 2.5/5