By Anealla Safdar

Film: Taken 2
Year: 2012
Director: Olivier Megaton
Stars: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace
Running Time: 91 min

‘Taken 2’ is an unsurprising sequel given that its predecessor (a film lead actor Liam Neeson thought would go straight to video) raked in $225 million worldwide four years ago.

Still heaving with protective instinct and clichéd dialogue, former CIA operative Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is forced to do more fighting with baddies, as opposed to just tracking them down as he did in 2008.

“I’m tired of it all”, Mills says at one point. Even so, he seems to reprise his role quite easily.

A fictional year separates the two films. The location has switched from Paris to Istanbul (or ‘Eastanbul’ as the protagonist mispronounces it), Mills’ daughter Kim has wisened up a smidge and revenge – as opposed to desperation – is the order of the day.

The stereotypes are just as crude, though. ‘Taken 2’ opens at a funeral on a grassy Albanian hilltop where an old man vows to violently seek justice for his lost son, just seconds after the Al-Fatiha reading has come to an end. Later a Gulf state official is shown lavishing brooding Mills a tip so great for his security work that it triggers a rare reaction – the towering 6’4 Irishman smiles.

Neeson’s Mills owns the action thriller follow-up. The quintessential aging boy-scout’s always be prepared attitude ranges from the sublime to absurd; the minute cell phone he tucks into his sock might look better with Austin Powers than James Bond.

‘Taken 2’ is a steady sequel, and is again almost implausible to take seriously. The word ‘taken’, for example, has inexplicably become so synonymous with kidnapping for the Mills family that it being uttered automatically sends shivers down young Kim’s spine. The final act, meanwhile, contains a scene resembling a Greco-Roman wrestling match.

Both films are produced and co-written by Luc Besson, but the director has changed. Frenchman Oliver Megaton (‘Hitman’, ‘Transporter 3’) inherited this year’s take from fellow countryman Pierre Morel (‘Transporter’, ‘From Paris With Love’.)

The question people will leave asking has already been discussed.

Neeson, now 60, reckons there won’t be a ‘Taken 3’. But, this is a man who thought the first tale of Bryan Mills’ overwhelming adventures would go straight to video.