Taken 2 (2012)

With Taken, Liam Neeson’s gravelly threat of a “very particular set of skills” led many filmgoers to wonder what was still waiting in that bag of tricks.  While not groundbreakingly original, Taken 2 replicates much of what worked in the first film and adds enough new material to justify the sequel treatment.

When news that a sequel was en route, audiences joked, “Who gets taken in the next one?  The mom?”  Well... yeah.  Taken 2 picks up about a year after the events of the first film, at the funeral of the Albanians killed by Bryan Mills (Neeson).  The families swear revenge on Bryan, who’s currently touring Istanbul with his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and daughter Kim (Maggie Grace).  This time, though, it’s Bryan and Lenore who are taken by the grieving father (Rade Šerbedžija) of one of Kim’s late kidnappers.  With the tables turned, Bryan uses his “skills” to coach Kim through a rescue attempt.

Don’t let the synopsis fool you, though – the star is very much still Neeson, with Grace’s role amped up to, mercifully, prevent her from being the damsel in distress once more.  While the premise isn’t wholly original, the film plays up more of Bryan’s “set of skills,” of which I’m sure this filmgoer wasn’t alone in wanting more.  While some of Bryan’s abilities defy any standard of realism, the laughter they elicit isn’t one of incredulous scorn but rather one of unforeseen inevitability.  Of course Bryan could deduce his location using only a grenade and a shoestring; he’s MacGyver by way of Jack Bauer, something the film pulls off by never letting up.

But what the film invents in Bryan’s talents, it never quite innovates beyond the formula of the first one – protective father singlehandedly defends family from evil Albanians.  Many of the scenes in the first film are reused here without new purpose.  Again we have Bryan’s trio of CIA buddies who don’t do much beyond drink beer and giggle at Bryan’s unrequited love for his ex-wife.  There’s the same framing technique of Bryan attempting to do something to help his daughter (singing lessons in the first film, driver’s license here).

Disappointingly, the one thing not replicated is the first film’s sense of humor.  While the audience is chuckling, we’re never really laughing with the characters, as we did in the first; Bryan is more humorless this time around, never really dropping one-liners or quips to accompany his kills.  This different mood is attributable in large part to the fact that Bryan doesn’t have a foil in this film as he did with Jean-Claude in the first; this lack is even more apparent since we see Jean-Claude in an early scene, never to return to him again.  If there’s a third film, I’m for bringing the French policeman back.

Instead, the focus is on the action and the deployment of unseen “skills.”  If the film could be used as a marketing tool for a seven-week course on “How to Acquire Bryan’s Skills,” it’d be successful by leaps and bounds.  The action is thrilling, unrelenting, and enviable; though humorless, the fight and chase scenes are unremitting.  Perhaps, though, the action is less compelling because of how inevitable it seems; having already seen what Bryan can do, the stakes seem somewhat lower here.  In Taken, it seemed he was up against an insurmountable 96 hours to rescue his daughter in the middle of Paris; here, though, his own abduction in Istanbul never seems more threatening than a mosquito bite.  (I haven’t yet decided if this is a strength, which allows the film to focus on how badass Bryan is, or a weakness, which doesn’t give sufficient stakes to justify a Mills-level response.)

Taken 2 does add a new thematic layer – the idea of the cyclical nature of vengeance and the inevitability that blood begets blood.  “Because I am tired of it all,” Bryan wearily intones near the film’s climax; it’s an oddly smart moment nestled inside the film, rejecting the easy popcorn-fueled “Kill ’em dead” attitude you might expect.  This is an idea I’d like to see explored more in a subsequent installment, but its inclusion here demonstrates that the filmmakers have done more than just give us a bigger version of the first film.

Ultimately, Taken 2 is a great sequel but perhaps not a great film.  Newcomers to the franchise won’t find much to thrill them and indeed might wonder, like the song goes, what’s it all about.  But fans of the original will find enough to enjoy here, a few worthwhile additions and enough amped-up repetition; where The Hangover 2 merely replicated the first film with more male nudity, Taken 2 repeats what worked and embellishes it so that it’s not a mere revision of the first.  Though it’s not an A-list cult film like the first, Taken 2 is a B-film that never disappoints.

Taken 2 is rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of violence and action, and some sensuality.”  As in the first film, there are plenty of shootings, stabbings, and fist fights, but only one knife wound is bloody.  Kim has a boyfriend in this film, with whom she makes out in one scene; she runs in a bikini in another.

Monday at the Movies - October 22, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-Eight of “Monday at the Movies.”  In anticipation of Wednesday’s review of Taken 2, we take a look back at the original.

Taken (2008) – Taken is the film that established Liam Neeson as an action star, and rightly so – his turn as Bryan Mills is forceful and exciting, an earnest breath of fresh air in a genre that is currently often too self-aware to be compelling.  While the first half-hour is a bit slow, it establishes Bryan’s dedication to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), so that we can fully enjoy the final hour of the film, which revolves around Bryan’s quest to save his daughter from Albanian slave traders in Paris.  Indeed, if the film is a perfect action film, it’s on the strength of this last hour, when Bryan deploys his “very particular set of skills” to great effect.  Though the film sometimes borders on incredulous, Neeson sells it by playing it straight, never winking at the credulity-straining moments.  All of this is not to say that the film, co-written by Luc Besson, is humorless; in fact, some of the film’s best scenes are its funniest, as when Bryan impersonates a French police officer in order to identify the voice of his daughter’s captor, Marko from Tropoje.  Bryan’s scenes with Marko, as well as his scenes with corrupt French policeman Jean-Claude (a suitably smarmy Olivier Rabourdin), let Neeson show off his acting chops while also layering on enough menace to prove that Bryan’s enemies have made a huge mistake.  What the film does best, though, is keep moving during this last hour.  There are no dull bits, only scenes that push Bryan and the plot forward with a clue or direction.  It’s a surprisingly good film, an A+ action film that under any other circumstances would have been a B-movie.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” Stay tuned for Wednesday’s review of the sequel, Taken 2!

The Professional (1994)

In a way, The Professional was exactly the film I was looking for.

The Professional (also known as Leon) was near the top of my "I can't believe I haven't seen these movies yet" list, especially in light of the fact that its writer/director, Luc Besson, wrote Taken, one of my all-time favorite action movies. Followers of this site have already noticed that it's been a while since I rated a film as "to my liking," much less "a great film." The losing streak, dear readers, is broken, because The Professional is both.

Leon (a very subdued Jean Reno) is a hitman, a self-professed "cleaner" who takes in orphan Mathilda (a very young Natalie Portman) after her family is gunned down by drug-addled DEA Agent Nathan Stansfield (a very outrageous Gary Oldman). As Stansfield seeks to tie up the last remaining loose end - namely, Mathilda - in his spiraling descent into drug-fueled madness, Leon struggles with his own paternalistic misgivings about Mathilda's request to be trained to be a cleaner.

The performances are stellar. I've knocked Jean Reno before for being hammy or for simply not trying, but it seems that's a new trend. He's fabulously restrained as Leon. It's a role that could have gone two ways - cold and emotionless or entirely creepy. Somehow, Reno finds a way to create a sympathetic character who's more human than not, a man who never poses a threat to Mathilda, even though the audience may be worried that his intentions with her may be less than pure. Roman Polanski he's not; no one in their right mind could accuse Leon of exploiting Mathilda, whom he comes to regard as a daughter. The key other half of that dynamic is Portman, who proves how talented she really is. She's endearingly gruff, deceptively innocent, and completely in control of her emotional spectrum. Though she's only 12, Mathilda is perhaps the most mature character in the film, and it's because of Portman's gifted acting that the character even succeeds; she's both completely human and a prototype for Kick-Ass's Hit-Girl, a stunning combination. And while we're talking stunning, let's acknowledge Oldman, who's wildly over the top as Stansfield. This is a versatile actor we're talking about; he's played Sid Vicious, Dracula, Stansfield, Lee Harvey Oswald, Commissioner Gordon, and Sirius Black in the same career - and done all in such a way that he's practically defined those characters. Stansfield ranks as one of the best movie villains I've ever seen, downright spooky and at times frightening (especially when he pops his special but unnamed pills) but never cartoonish to the point of improbability.

High praise to Besson for melding a knockout script and dynamite visuals - to him belongs all the credit, since he wrote and directed it all on his own. While he owes a lot to his three fine actors, Besson deserves a hearty pat on the back for a freshly original story (even sixteen years later, it still holds up) which avoids predictability and never falters, even though almost no action occurs between Mathilda's adoption and the final confrontation with Stansfield. For this, we have the directing to thank; Besson is a prince when it comes to inventive camera angles, a master of pacing, and a pro at eliciting good performances out of already solid actors.

One thing I particularly loved about The Professional - aside from the downright stunning gunfight scenes and Jack Bauer-esque escapes - is the way that Besson creates compellingly human characters in Leon and Mathilda while establishing a key divide between them and Stansfield. Leon and Mathilda have backstories which inform their personalities, which in turn inform each other as to why the other one behaves the way he/she does. All of this is done in an entirely clear manner so that the audience never wonders, "Why is Mathilda doing that? Why didn't Leon say this?" Conversely, we have no idea why Stansfield behaves the way he does; he is, like Ledger's Joker, an absolute force of chaos blowing in and out of the movie. He's a DEA agent, sure, but why is he involved in drugs? Is it business or personal? On a scale of one to ten, how crazy is he? The characters that need to be human are, and are entirely, but the villain is more akin to a tornado than a mastermind. The clash of reckless madman and methodical hitman is golden, but it never feels overwrought. Indeed, the real heart of the piece is what is unsaid between Leon and Mathilda.

Simply put, The Professional is one of the best movies of the 1990s. Indeed, if I ever get around to making a "best of the decades" list and The Professional's not on it, call me out, and I'll eat my hat.
The Professional is rated a very hard R "for scenes of strong graphic violence, and for language." It's a movie about a hitman who kills a lot of people in very bloody shoot-outs, and several F-bombs trickle in along the way.