Liam Neeson officially became an onscreen action movie badass with the slow-burn success of the 2008/2009 film, Taken. Starring as Bryan Mills, an ex-CIA operative who comes crashing into the European sex-trafficking underworld to save his abducted daughter, the actor (who was in his late ’50s at the time) opened up a whole new lane for his acclaimed career.
With Taken 2, Neeson will be pushing age sixty, but that fact is seemingly irrelevant, as the official Taken 2 trailer proves that Mr. Neeson is as badass as ever.
Unlike the Taken 2 international trailers which provided a first taste of the sequel’s flavor, this domestic trailer starts things off on a happy note (rather than an ominous one). We see Mills and his (estranged?) family – ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) – meeting up in Istanbul for an impromptu vacation, never realizing that the proverbial Sword of Damocles is dangling overhead. Every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction, and the ass-kicking that Mills did in the first film has left relatives of the dispatched Albanian sex-traffickers very sore, indeed. When the crooks come looking for payback, they try to use Bryan’s family as bait – a plan that is only partially successful.
The beauty of Taken 2 is that – unlike, say, Die Hard 2 - there is no major contrivance at work to put the main character in circumstances similar to what he experienced in the first film. Instead, screenwriter/producer Luc Besson and his frequent collaborator Robert Mark Kamen (The Fifth Element, The Transporter) have created a logical and organic way to continue the story. There’s even a great moment in the trailer where we can see the possiblity of Taken 3, as Mills – on the phone with his enemy – makes the observation that even he kills this new wave of baddies, their kin will inevitably rise up for vengeance…and will be promptly killed as well.
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