"Be casual, blend in," Bryan orders Kim, who then looks totally casual as an American girl in a bikini top frantically running barefoot around an Istanbul hotel.ĭad promises her he'll stop these faceless baddies from bothering their family again. The film had a trio of first place openings in major markets, starting with the U.K. (For some reason, we're also supposed to care if Kim passes her driver's test.) Kim misses dad's frantic calls because she's Skyping with her boyfriend (Luke Grimes of "Brothers and Sisters"). Taken 2 was just as strong internationally as it was domestically earning first place with 55.23 million on 6,319 screens in 50 markets for a total of 66.79 million. In "Taken 2" director Oliver Megaton ("Colombiana") substitutes disposable action and characters that haven't learned anything from their past for the dangers of naive travel. The first "Taken" worked as a B-movie about a dad who would do anything for his daughter-which is easier when you have the ass-kicking skills of 100 people. When Kim asks where he is, Bryan doesn't say, "Three blocks away from birds." That includes ordering Kim to throw grenades in random places to help him gauge necessary locations, apparently because his method of memorizing sounds like boats and birds while hooded in a van clearly didn't pay off.
That would have spared us from a henchman needlessly exclaiming to his colleague, "I shot some guy," after shooting some guy, or Bryan's quick series of commands to Lenore and Kim that no non-spy could ever remember and execute in a high-pressure setting.
When he receives calls about the progress of the mission, he's just sitting in a chair in an empty room, as if writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen preferred to write as little as possible. In some of many unintentionally hilarious moments in this infinitely stupid sequel, Murad spends his downtime doing absolutely nothing. He demands revenge on the boy's killer, launching a roughly 30-man operation to capture Bryan, his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), and Kim during their trip to Istanbul. No, Murad (Rade Serbedzija) doesn't care that his son was a kidnapper who ruined the lives of innocent young women.
That should've been a clue to leave this one-man wrecking crew alone. In "Taken," ex-spy Bryan (Liam Neeson) made single-handedly killing the Albanians who kidnapped his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) look easy.