Taken 2 (2012) - Movie Review

Maybe Liam Neeson should stay home for a while...

Seriously he shouldn't go anywhere.  He either gets in a plane crash or someone gets kidnapped.

Spoilers ahead...

It's been a year since the events of Taken and things seems to be looking up for Bryan Mills.  He has a much better relationship with his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), and things are going well with his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace).  In the past he'd be gone after a few weeks, but is now present in their lives, even taking time to teach Kim how to drive.  Why a college student living in LA doesn't know how to drive yet I'll never understand.

Anyway, there's not much to the plot.  You learn that the father of Kim's kidnapper from the first film wants revenge. He then attempts to kidnap the Mills family while they are vacationing in Istanbul.  Mills fights back.  That's it.  That's the entire plot.  There aren't any surprises here and it's pretty predictable.

What made Taken so much fun was that it really caught everyone by surprise.  Nobody was expecting much from it, but it was tension filled and had all these great moments of impact.  They captured lightning in a bottle, and ended up with a hit.  Naturally, a sequel was coming, but unfortunately, Taken 2 is a step back in quality.  There's so many silly and convenient things done with the plot that it feels amateurish at times.  Here's a few examples:

• Early in the film, Kim steals some clothes from a random locker, and they appeared to be men's clothing, but they happen to fit her perfectly.
• Mills has Kim throw several grenades around the city and nobody ever seems to mind or notice.
• Naturally, Kim is forced to drive in a high speed chase, and is suddenly now an expert driver, even though she failed her previous drivers test.  Quick learning curve, eh?  
• During this scene Mills basically says to Kim that since she can't shoot a gun, then she needs to drive.  This made me wonder that considering Mills 'particular set of skills', and what happened to his daughter in the previous film, how come he hasn't bothered teaching her self defense or how to use a gun?  Wouldn't that be something a person like Mills would be concerned with in case someone attempted to kidnap her again?
• Midway through the film, Mills and Kim crash through the US embassy, and their car gets all shot up in the process.  You see soldiers converging on the car, yet in the very next scene Mills is walking around town again hot on the heels of the kidnappers without any explanation of how he got out of the embassy.  It seems like a really important step was skipped there.
• The first time Mills escapes from the kidnappers, he leaves his ex-wife behind without having her hide or securing her somewhere, allowing her to immediately be kidnapped again.

The bad guys were pretty stupid, too.  It was like how when a Bond villain tells him his entire plan, but then leaves the room allowing him plenty of time to escape.  What's the deal with the main bad guy (Rade Serbedzija) anyway?.  His son kidnaps Mills' daughter, among many others, Mills gets his daughter back killing the son in the process, but the father thinks he's the one that needs revenge.  Seems like you're pretty much in the even column at this point.  Mills even get the opportunity to explain this to the guy, and he just didn't care.  He was about as cookie cutter and single minded as a villain can get.

Yeah, I get it.  Taken 2 isn't a movie meant to be steeped in realism or worrying about things like logic.

There's some really awful dialog, and it's not just with the bad guys.  I even thought some of the dialog between Mills and Kim was very uncomfortable.  He's asking her things like if she loves her boyfriend, and if she's ever been in love before.  That just seemed weird to me.  The script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen badly needed some punch up.  There were many missed opportunities to inject some humor or one liners that would have put some fun in the film.

Taken 2 was directed by Luc Besson's current go-to guy, Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3, Columbiana), which is a great name for an action director.  Megaton does a good job with keeping the pace of the film tight, and it doesn't really suffer from any slow down in the action, but it's just too one-dimensional.  That's as much to blame on Besson and Kamen though.  It also has a pretty unsatisfying ending.  

The action isn't bad, but it's still a step back from the first film.  In early fight, it was nearly impossible to tell what was going on due to all the quick cuts and rapid moving camera work.  The only time you seemed to get a real good shot of the hand-to-hand action was towards the end when he fights a guy in a track suit that's roughly the same age as Liam Neeson.  He also seems to kill several guys in the movie without really doing much to the guy other than hitting them, which I thought only Chuck Norris could do.  Neeson was at his best once he had a gun.

Liam Neeson wasn't bad, but he can play this role in his sleep.  He didn't seem as invested this time around.  There's one cool thing that they did where they show you a little insight into the thought process once he's kidnapped, and you see how he's taking in details, so he knows where and what the situation is, but it gets abandoned shortly after.  Maggie Grace got a little more to do this time around and actually got to take part in the action and rescuing.  I do think it's kind of funny that she's almost 30 and still passing for much younger.  I think we'd all like to know her anti-aging secrets.  I love Famke Janssen, but it only seemed like she was in the movie only to be consistent with the first film.  Her role this time around consisted of either crying, or waking up from being unconscious.  It's not her fault, the script just didn't give her much to do.

I didn't hate Taken 2, and it's not the worst thing I've ever seen, but it's another case of sequelitis striking again.  It's just more of the same, except it's missing the tension and thrills of the first film. This felt like they were making it up as they went along, and it's about as lazy as a sequel gets.  I can't recommend this as anything more than a rental.  You'd be better off just watching the first Taken again this weekend on DVD and save yourself some money.

2.5 (out of 5) Death Stars.

Lockout (2012) - Movie Review

If only Guy Pearce would have suffered from the same memory affliction he had in Memento, it would have added a nice wrinkle to his character.  Also, having no short-term memory would have likely made Lockout easier to watch.  This review is going to be spoiler-heavy, so skip to the end if you're planning on watching this soon.

Guy Pearce stars as Snow, a former government agent wrongly accused and convicted of a crime he didn't commit.  Lockout begins with Snow being interrogated by Peter Stormare (who seems to be reduced to playing ridiculous characters) and flashing back to the events leading to his capture.  As Snow's recalling the events, you are treated to one of the worst CG-chase sequences I've seen in a very long time.  It looked like something from a bad video game, except video games tend to have better cut scenes.  I've seen better CG on SyFy.

Anyway in this scene, he's riding a motorcycle that doesn't have a front wheel.  It's unsure if they just didn't have the budget to CG in the front wheel, or in the future we have super-motorcycles that no longer need front wheels.  The whole scene was awful looking and you could barely tell what was going on.   At one point the hover-copter he's being chased by explodes for no reason at all.  This also sets up the exchange of some briefcase to Snow's partner that contains something important, but we have no idea what.

Next, we're introduced to Emilie Warnock (Maggie Grace), the President's daughter who's on a humanitarian mission to MS:One, a penal colony in Earth's orbit.  She wants to make sure the prisoners are being treated well, as they are held in stasis and it's believed that it has adverse affects on their sanity.  This immediately makes you wonder, if they are held in stasis, then why even bother with an outer space prison?  You can't just have them held in stasis on Earth for much cheaper?  Doesn't having a space station increase the chances of something going wrong by like a million?  They try to explain that the underwriters of the prison are secretly using the inmates as guinea pigs to test the effects of deep space on humans, but seemed like a poor script excuse to justify having the space prison in the first place.  Space exploration is never brought up in the movie again either.

They bring one prisoner (Joseph Gilgun) to talk to Emilie and it's clear that this prisoner is mentally disturbed, so you know it's going to go well.  Again, you have to wonder why did they pick that prisoner?  Maybe pick a prisoner that wasn't nuts before he was put in stasis.  Naturally, things go wrong; the prisoner escapes, manages to bring the prison population out of stasis, and take hostages.  The crazy prisoner is joined by his less-crazy brother, Alex (Vincent Regan), who takes the leadership role.  I don't know what the prisoners wanted, because I don't think they ever actually made any demands.  It didn't matter, because they pretty much killed all the hostages anyway, even though Alex pointed out that they needed the hostages as bargaining chips.

Anyway, forced to act, Snow is tasked with sneaking into MS:One and getting Emilie out.  Snow has no interest in going, but he agrees after finding out that his partner was captured and is on MS:One.  Snow's real goal is to find out the location of the briefcase exchanged earlier, which can now help prove his innocence.

Once Snow gets on MS:One, it's basically Die Hard in space, with Snow sneaking around and crawling through tunnels and air ducts.  In a way, Lockout will remind you of older, 80's action films.  Nearly every line of dialog felt like a bad one-liner.  However, this is one of those movies where you question nearly everything said or done as making no sense or being totally illogical.

For example, once Snow first finds Emilie, he attacks the inmate escorting them in an attempt to rescue them.  Even though he is clearly dressed as a agent and not a inmate, and just finished attacking the inmate that's with them, Emilie's response is to hit Snow in the head with a fire extinguisher.  She doesn't ask who he is first or notice that he was trying to rescue her.

At one point, they make sure you point out the scene is taking place on Earth by putting an "Earth" at the bottom of the screen.  Oh, is that where we are now?  Earth?  I never would have realized that considering everything else in the movie has happened on Earth and they haven't even hinted at being on other planets.

Later in the movie, a space station appears out of nowhere and crashes into the prison.  We're then told that MS:One needs constant monitoring or it will crash back into Earth.  Why have a space station that if left unmanned for even short period of time, will crash into the Earth?  How does that make any sense from a design or safety standpoint?

Finally, at the end there's this big space action sequence where a huge squad of space fighters assault MS: One, but all they do is fly around and not shoot, even though their goal is to destroy the station.  Meanwhile, they all get picked off one-by-one by the station's automated defenses.  One of the fighters flies up the middle of the station and drops a bomb that has a 30 second countdown to add dramatic tension.  In one last ridiculous sequence, Snow and Emilie jump out of the station just in time, manage to not burn up on re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, deploy parachutes and safely land on the street just seconds later.

I feel bad for Guy Pearce.  I think he was really trying here, and even seemed to have fun, but he deserves better.  The dialog he's forced to recite here is eye-rollingly awful.  It's not just his dialog either, the whole movie is a poorly written mess.  Lockout was co-written and directed by Stephen St. Leger and James Mather, and I really hope this isn't the best they can do.  Luc Besson also shared writing duties and we are told that this was based on an 'original idea' from him.  If that's the case, he's run out of ideas, or at least ideas that couldn't have also been conceived by a 13-year-old.  There's also very little blood or language, so it manages to preserve a PG-13 rating and utlimately I think that's who this will appeal to best.

I wanted to have fun with Lockout, but I just ended up getting annoyed with how stupid everything was.  There's never any real tension or anything to make you care about what's going on.  Overall, Lockout is mess.  The actors are doing their best, but they aren't given much to work with.  I've said this already, but it really is a bad video game come to life.  It's a rental at best.

1.5 (out of 5) Death Stars