Film Review | Taken 2

It's hardly surprising that 2008's revenge thriller Taken spawned a sequel. After all, the Liam Neeson-starring, French-produced actioner was made on a relatively skimpy budget of $25 million, only to rake in an impressive total of over $200 million.

But though the numbers are definitely persuasive, the central premise of the now-franchise is hardly amenable to expansion.

Even Neeson himself - whose career has unexpectedly sprung into action territory following the release of the original - had little hope of the film even breaking even, recently confessing that he expected Taken to be relegated to a straight-to-DVD release.

Charged with playing CIA operative Bryan Mills, Neeson was forced to use his character's "particular set of skills" for more personal reasons after his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) gets kidnapped by a human trafficking ring.

It's hardly a spoiler (right?) that Bryan summarily dispatches of the - unanimously 'ethnic' - baddies in the most satisfyingly grisly way imaginable (political correctness, be damned!).

But now, the villains' relatives begin to plot their revenge, as Albanian kidnapping ringleader Murad (Rade Serbedzija) mobilises a team of bearded goons to go after Bryan and his family, currently holidaying in Istanbul.

While the bad guys fail to snatch all three of them in one go - by a stroke of luck, Kim is separated from her parents when they swoop in - Kim is forced to re-live her trauma from a few years back, only this time on the opposite end.

Her only hope for survival is to locate her father before she gets 'taken' too, while Bryan will have to fight his way through captivity to ensure that his family remains safe before he can get to doing what he "does best".

That this technically unnecessary sequel will be as xenophobic and by-the-numbers as its original is something of a foregone conclusion, and director Oliver Megaton (Colombiana, Transporter 3), makes virtually no effort at all to claw his way out of this pigeonhole.

Why would he, you might ask, if the film's already a shoo-in as a blockbuster hit? (You'd be right, too: at the time of writing, it's positioned itself snugly at the top of the US box office chart). And it's not like the film is devoid of enjoyable set pieces.

Kim's escape from an Istanbul hotel room involves some DIY espionage high jinks - courtesy of daddy - that are ludicrous enough to be memorable (think: Hansel and Gretel's trail of breadcrumbs, but with explosives instead), and a car chase around the third quarter, while hardly serving up anything original, is genuinely thrilling and - what is increasingly becoming a rarity in a world where 'shaky cam' reigns supreme - refreshingly intelligible.

It's a pity that the team don't seem to have the requisite energy to take this all the way, instead choosing to languish in B-movie purgatory.

(It's perhaps worth noting that writer-producer Luc Besson, the master of French action-hokum, is behind all this. Besson's brand of dependable-but-rote US-sponsored lucrative trash strikes a note so blisteringly cynical that it serves as a direct affront to his country's famously arthouse-friendly cinematic output.)

The army of track-suited-and-stubble-bearing bad guys is so interchangeable that there's no real drama there, either: it feels like Mills is just disposing of Stormtroopers. Even the choice of Serbedzija, their supposed rallying banner, is thoroughly uninteresting - the Croatian actor is often employed to fill in the role of generic Eastern European villains, and there's not a single twitch of uniqueness on display here.

The original Taken has had its moment of glory. But perhaps its sequel would have been more honourably served by a straight-to-DVD release, after all.