“I don’t know you who are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for information, I can tell you I’m not too bright. But what I am is very good at movie reviews. If you stop reading now, that will be the end of it. I will not entertain you. I will not inform you. But if you don’t, I will amuse you, and I will inform you.”

Taken 2 picks up immediately where the first one left off. Kim (Maggie Grace) is adjusting to normal life after being taken, Lenore (Famke Janssen) is having marital problems, and Bryan (Liam Neeson) is, well, still awesome and hardly shaken up about the mass murders he just committed. The basic plot is that Bryan invites his ex-wife and daughter to a weekend in Istanbul for relaxation, only to run into the families of the men he killed looking for his daughter in the first movie. After all, you can’t destroy that much public property and kill that many people without some repercussions.

In short, they kidnap Bryan and Lenore and it’s up to Kim to find them, at least in the beginning. Aside from Bryan’s abnormal ability to recall how far the kidnappers took him and his wife while blindfolded, it’s also highly impractical how Kim finds them. Bryan tells her to throw grenades. That’s right. Grenades. In a highly populated area. The science behind it is that he counts the seconds until he hears the explosion to determine how far he is from his daughter (Not to mention she has an arm like a pro baseball player). You would think a man of his skills would be trained to avoid civilian casualties. But not this time. He doesn’t care as long as he gets his wife and himself free.

After Kim finds them, it’s basically the same plot as the first Taken. He hunts down the families that had kidnapped them and destroys them. Once he is free, nothing can stop him. No one slows him down. No one shoots him and everyone tries. The odds of that many men with that many guns, who aren’t just average guys by the way, and none of them can hit him is just a little farfetched.

I won’t tell you the ending because it’s epic. I’m not saying it’s a bad movie because it’s not. It is still a great action movie, but that’s where it stops. It isn’t theatre worthy, but it definitely is a Redbox movie. Watch it with friends, though. You can “ooo” at the awesome action, “ahh” at Neeson’s moves,  and chuckle at the cheesy scenes.

Adam McDonald, Co-Editor