To secure a 12 rating over in the UK (why? Are tweens really dying to see 60-year-old Liam Neeson run through Istanbul?), the sequel to 2008’s fun revenge flick toned down its violence and gore – but most of the changes were apparently made in the editing suite. So shoddily cut it’s often incomprehensible, the fight-heavy, blood-light thriller frequently betrays its more graphic first draft.
A knife is held to a character’s face, only for the camera to cut away at the slicing. Was their throat slit? Ear hacked off? Damned if I could tell. Likewise, a supposedly climactic death has its bloodshed so heavily edited it appears Neeson can kill people just by squeezing their chins.
Ordinarily, a lack of bone crunching and blood splattering wouldn’t detract hugely from a film, but without it, the weakness of Luc Besson’s writing – just about forgivable in the original – becomes grating. Though Neeson is as gruffly charismatic as ever, his (now slightly flabbier and gawkier stunts) fail to compensate for the shallow villains.
Taken 2 doesn’t just steal from its predecessor. It also lifts blatently from Nicolas Winding Refn’s neo-noir thriller Drive. “I’m tired of this,” Liam Neeson tells his family’s kidnapper. Us too.