Or it could be because crucial shots have been excised to secure a 12A rating (the original was 15, with an 18 director's cut). It might be to disguise the fact that Neeson, who’s just turned 60, isn’t exactly Jet Li. Time and again Mills faces off against foes, only for the resulting scraps to unfold so confusingly - thanks to shakycam, overcranking and merciless strobe-cuts - that it appears he’s editing people to death. Instead, it retains all the twitchy xenophobia of the original - sending the all-American, occasionally-Irish-accented Mills to Istanbul, another foreign city seemingly lousy with lowlifes - while dropping the ball on all the OTT action that made Taken so much fun.īlame must be laid at the feet of director Olivier Megaton (the man behind Transporter 3 and Colombiana, replacing Taken’s Pierre Morel), who has an excellent name but fists of ham when it comes to lensing combat.
Sadly for those fans, Taken 2 fails to go bigger, badder, better. Instead it made $227 million worldwide, turned him into a late-in-life action star and made the sequel an inevitability. No-one was more surprised than Neeson himself, who recently admitted he’d expected it to go straight to DVD. The kind of guy who secretly installs a GPS chip in his daughter’s phone, and who thinks a karaoke machine will make a brilliant birthday present.Īll these qualities earned Mills, as played with pleasingly poker-faced intensity by Liam Neeson, a large following when Taken came out in 2008. At heart he’s a worrywart, constantly fretting about his family’s safety but mostly embarrassing them in the process. Yet there’s also an endearing awkwardness that sets him apart from all those other one-man armies. Not to mention his very particular set of skills, which make him a nightmare for anyone foreign and in need of a shave. He’s a taciturn, leather-jacketed super-soldier-turned-bodyguard who begins 70 per cent of his sentences with the words, “Listen to me very carefully.” He’s killed more people than you’ve had hot dinners, and probably some of them with hot dinners. At a time when iconic action heroes are few and far between, Bryan Mills stands tall - and not just because he’s 6’ 4”.