Review: Taken 2 (2012) cuts its nose to spite its face.

Taken 2

2012

92 minutes

rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Despite my best efforts, I actually saw Taken 2 last night.  Long-story short, I had time to see a film late last night and everything else I wanted to see either had inconvenient showtimes (The Perks of Being A Wallflower), was something my wife wanted to see (Sinister, Pitch Perfect), or was something that my daughter may eventually decide she wants to see after all (Frankenweenie).  And yes, as expected, Taken 2 was indeed a bad movie.  But it was bad in a rather surprising way.  First of all, unlike the lean, mean, and rather cold-hearted original, this sequel not only was edited to achieve a PG-13 in a way the first film was not (the differences in the first film's international R-rated cut and the PG-13 version were minimal), but it was pitched to a younger audience.  Gone were the moments of cruelty or out-and-out brutality.  Gone was the unrelenting determination of Liam Neeson's bad-ass, willing to shoot innocent bystanders and threaten the family of a crooked cop, replaced by a painfully generic "I have to save my wife from bad guys and mostly attack in pure self-defense or defense of others".  With a subplot involving Maggie Grace's driving test, which arguably harkens back to the much-loathed "Jeff Goldblum's daughter proves she shouldn't have been cut from the gymnastic team' gag in The Lost World, and an emphasis on reconciling a dysfunctional nuclear family, the film feels pitched to a weirdly conformist and/or younger audience.