Taken 2


Posted October 18, 2012 in Arts

Director: Oliver Megaton

Talent: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace

Release Date: 4th October 2012

Taken 2 director Oliver Megaton takes his surname from his birthday: August 6th 1965, the 20th anniversary of the dropping of a uranium bomb on Hiroshima by US forces. The film is suitably reactionary, grotesque and full of the ethnic stereotyping that characterised the first outing, helmed by Pierre Morel, but with less visible violence and bone-breaking (it’s a 12A certificate this time, currently under appeal). Liam Neeson’s ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills is pursued in Istanbul by the Albanian relatives and friends of those he killed in 2008’s Taken, and must ensure his ex-wife Lenore (Janssen) and daughter Kim’s (Grace) safety through violent means in the city where, he observes in the exposition, all historical conflicts between East and West have taken place, in some way or another (well, not quite all). At the same time, he must come to terms with Kim’s new relationship with collegiate slacker Jamie (Luke Grimes) and the break-up of Lenore’s second marriage prompting a renewal of romantic feelings for him.

Early on in the film, while placing his weaponry back into its suitcase in his Istanbul hotel room, Bryan’s television shows a news report detailing the deaths of six soldiers in Afghanistan. This constitutes the only instance of the film contextualising itself in the Real World, as far as global conflict or politics is concerned, but it also serves to suggest that, while the bad guys are Albanian, we’re really talking, to some extent, about Afghans here. No more does this become apparent than in the film’s climactic scene where, having slaughtered his many swarthy assailants, Bryan is left face-to-face with their leader, Murad (Rade Serbedzija). In an uncharacteristic show of grace, Bryan drops his gun to the ground, saying he will spare the life of his enemy in exchange for his word that this would mean an end to the vendetta. Murad agrees, but as Bryan is walking away, he picks up the pistol and aims a shot at the American’s back, only for the trigger to click anticlimactically. Bryan turns to reveal a bullet in his open palm and kills Murad, resigned to the continuation of bloodshed his decision will produce.

In line with the imperialist lie that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a means of ending WWII with a grand gesture of military-nuclear power—despite there being two bombings rather than one, each utilising a vastly different type of device, perhaps as a means of testing their individual effects on a human population—Taken 2 requires us to believe in Bryan’s final gesture as one of graciousness, even though he had secretly removed the bullet from the gun’s chamber and forced Murad into a negotiation in which his options basically constituted life or death. It represents, too, a troublesome and rather transparent reading of US interventionism and the possibility of “peace”, only on empire’s terms. Taken 2 is a return to the cinematic politics of the 1980s blockbuster, enriched with overt, patriarchal, sexual anxiety and writer/producer Luc Besson’s admittedly impressive spatial sensibilities: it is as grotesque, farcical, cruel and outrageous as its director’s adopted surname, but at least U2 aren’t in it this time.

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