Liam Neeson Back in “Taken 2”

Liam Neeson Back in “Taken 2”

Shot in Istanbul, Turkey and directed by Olivier Megaton , “Taken 2” reunites Liam Neeson with his co-stars Famke Janssen and Maggie Grace in this rocket-paced action sequel that rivals some of the greatest gun-handlers in cinema history.

Neeson reprises the role of Bryan Mills, a father and an estranged husband who would do anything for his family in the movie. Mills’ daughter having been kidnapped the first time. But he faces a different kind of conflict in “Taken 2.” Liam Neeson returns as Bryan Mills, the retired CIA agent with a particular set of skills who stopped at nothing to save his daughter Kim from Albanian kidnappers. When the father of one of the kidnappers swears revenge, and takes Bryan and his wife hostage during their family vacation in Istanbul, Bryan enlists Kim to help them escape, and uses the same advanced level of special forces tactics to get his family to safety and then systematically take out the kidnappers one by one.

“In the first movie he's really a guy with nothing to lose. He's divorced, he's lost his daughter, and you see his reaction when she's kidnapped,” explains Megaton. “In this movie, he's got that relationship back and he's even flirting with his ex-wife. It's almost cheesy, but that makes him all the more human at the beginning of the movie, because he's not thinking about his training, he's thinking about his family.”

But being kidnapped once is unfortunate; twice is just careless. Rest assured, then, that things play out differently in this sequel. “The powers-that-be–namely our gracious leader Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen - have come up with a much better plot than that,” assures Grace. “Someone has the notion of attempting to abduct Bryan. It's a personal vendetta; someone bent on extracting recompense from a man with a particular set of skills, as ill-advised as that might be. So it's not a random second abduction of my character, Kim, which I think would be everyone's first concern.”


“Taken 2” opens October in theaters from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.