The general word on this film is that it is not as good as the first one, which I will agree with, although I will defend it by saying that it isn't necessarily bad. I think that the main fault is that he's mainly motivated by survival in this film, whereas in the first one his motivation was far more archetypal and hit a primal nerve in the audiences. He normally would have been too brutal of a main character, but it made sense because his daughter was kidnapped. This time, since he's the one who's taken, it's about survival, and it just isn't as pleasurable to watch. It doesn't have that magnetic element that simply clicks with audiences.

However, I remember when I saw the advertisements that I thought that it wasn't going to have any Liam Neeson action and that it was all going to be the daughter following his instructions. I'm glad to report that, in this movie's favor, it still gives Bryan Mills plenty of butt-kicking action and that he's almost as brutal as in the first film. He also comes up with some very crafty solutions for finding out information on where he and his wife have been taken, and his detective skills were perhaps one of the best parts of the film.

On a more technical note, I played a little game while watching the film. It was called "count the number of seconds in each camera shot." I rarely got past two seconds. The director does not have my respect, and I hope that when the inevitable Taken 3 rolls around, they can bump the average shot length up to ten seconds, which I think would be pretty reasonable.

There's a scene where Liam Neeson crashes into the American embassy in Istanbul. We never get to see their reaction to that, and in the next scene he's back on the streets doing detective work all by himself. Something seemed very contrived about that. I know that almost everything about this film is contrived in order to be a quintessential action film with creative fight scenes where Liam Neeson manages to kill every single one of the bad guys, but this particular point stood out and disrupted the film.

The other point of contention that I think people could walk away criticizing is that Bryan Mill's daughter, by the end, seems unphased. I and the people I watched the film with laughed at the ending, because realistically she would be paranoid of ever even leaving the house.

Oh, and there's a boyfriend who shows up briefly in this film. Bryan Mills acts like a typical father and is suspicious and not easily won by the poor lad. I swear, that could have been played up for so much more, since he is easily ten times more protective than the average father. Alas, I hope that's a chemistry that's built off of in Taken 3.

On the whole, however, I'm not saying that it was a bad action movie. Action films that I would consider pure action films aren't as common today as they were a few decades ago, so if you like your high octane, it will live up to that promise. Just don't go in expecting a memetic moment anywhere near as powerful as "I will look for you; I will find you; and I will kill you."