Taken 2 (2012)

  Movies like this are why I have a "meh" tag.  Like, it's not good by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not so bad that I want to kill it with fire.  It just sort of exists.

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is trying to reconnect with his daughter (Maggie Grace) after the kidnapping incident from a couple of years ago.  All she wants to do is have a normal life, including passing her drivers' test, and making out with her new boyfriend (Jon Gries).  Meanwhile, Bryan's ex-wife (Famke Janssen) is having a rough time in her marriage.  Being a generally good guy, Bryan invites the ex and the daughter to visit with him in Istanbul for a bit, after the culmination of his body guarding job.  He is completely unaware that the Albanian human traffickers he handily dispatched in the first movie had a host of relatives now out for his blood.  They kidnap him and his ex-wife, which is a Bad Idea.

This falls under the "Shameless Grab for Cash" category of movies.  The first Taken was surprisingly good and very well-received so of course the studio immediately had to make as many in the same vein as they could before everyone got tired of it.

That's not my biggest problem with the movie, however.

I thought Maggie Grace's character was supposed to be college-aged in the first movie.  How is she 22/23 and not have a driver's license?  Is she supposed to be 16?  That makes no sense.  If she's sixteen for the events of this movie, that means she was 14 for Taken 1.  Maggie Grace the actress was 29 in 2012.  She's a beautiful woman (and I say this with all the love I can muster) but what the fuck is she doing trying to play a teenager?  Does Hollywood not have age-appropriate people?

This is the kind of stuff going through my head as I'm trying to watch this movie.  It was very distracting.