Film Review - Taken 2

Taken 2

Ok - it's been a while sincem y last post, due to a combination of laziness and me being busy with other things. So I thought I'd make this post something special - my first ever film review!

On the one hand, I don;t envy the director and writer of this film - they had a really tough act to follow. Taken was a stunning film - up there with Die Hard and Terminatir 2 as one of the great action classics. But on the other, it shouldn't have been too difficult to do - this isn't Citizen Kane 2 after all. All they had to do was make a good action film, and let's face it, if Steven Seagal can do it, anyone can. Somehow, though, through a mixture of half-arsed writing, a reliance on tired cliches and a complete lack of plausibility, they managed to fuck up that most un-fuckupable genre. A bad action film is not like any other kind of bad film - when someone makes a shit horror film, or an unfunny comedy, that's fair enough; those are damn hard things to get right. But action? Come on. A director failing to make a good action film is like Frankie Boyle failing to be offensive. Even a film like Rambo: First Blood Part 3 (which we can take as being the universal standard for measuring awfulness) is at least enjoyable. It takes a special kind of incompetence to make an action film so soul-searingly terrible that it's not even exciting. But the team responsible for Taken 2 have managed it.

The dialogue sounds like it was written by a fifteen-year-old in half an hour. The action scenes are plodding, dull affairs, the set-peice chase scenes strecth plausibility to breaking point (even by action film standards) and the attempts to build suspense are laughable. At one point, I suggested to the people I was watching it with that we create a drinking game based on this film: every time Liam Neeson says "I need to to focus/listen," you drink. Had we gone through with that, we would have been plastered within half an hour.

Because I'm a merciful man, I will spare you the details of the hilarious climactic fight scene, Liam Neeson's character's complete inability to do the kind of thing he did without even breaking a sweat in the first film, or the sheer predictability of this appalling pile of crap. Suffice to say, don;t buy this. Don't even pirate it - if you see the cover of the DVD in a shop, avert your eyes lest the raw, toxic fuckwittery of this film infect you.

Rating: 2/10