Agent Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) has made a few enemies recently. Over a year ago, he was saving his teenage daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and her friend from people traffickers and in the process killed a few bad guys. But even bad guys have friends and relations who loved them, so it is when the Albanian gangsters behind the modern slavery operation, led by kingpin Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija), have buried their dead they are determined to stop Mills in his tracks once and for all. Revenge is the order of the day, they just have to bide their time until he is within their grasp, then strike...
And if he's brought his family along, so much the better, let's make an occasion of it. This was the follow-up to the sizeable cult hit Taken, which had set Neeson on a path of the most mature man of action since the days when Charles Bronson was blowing away villains with his great big gun, and while there were still stars of the nineteen-eighties who had been shooting people and exploding things in the name of entertainment plugging away at the genre, Neeson was relatively new at the game, though audiences were glad to see him join their ranks. Even so, Taken 2 might have been a hit, but it wasn't exactly relished with the same enthusiasm.
The main problem was that it was not Mills hunting down his daughter this time around, but his daughter hunting down him. The plot could be split into three acts, starting with a long, drawn out establishing of the premise that most of those watching would be already up to speed with and therefore shifting in their seats waiting for the action to begin. It took half an hour (half an hour!) to commence the suspense, with Mills and his wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) accompanied by Kim, inexplicably all travelling to Turkey together in spite of the troubles which afflicted them last time that happened. Fearless, or simply stupid? It wasn't a good sign when you were querying the common sense of the supposedly super-able hero.
Anyway, as if you hadn't guessed there was a contingent of very angry Albanians out for blood, but naturally they've been ordered to take the three Americans alive. Therefore while Kim stays at the hotel to contact her boyfriend (over-protective Mills doesn't approve, of course) her parents are chased through the streets of Istanbul and eventually captured and imprisoned. Now, much of the entertainment value of the original was seeing Mills make life difficult for the gangsters because he was able to turn the tables on them and make the criminals fear for their lives, but swapping the roles wasn't anywhere near as satisfying. Plus it was Kim who was doing most of the proactive business of finding and freeing her folks.
