I'm going to play a little game with Taken 2; I'm going to count how many times Liam Neeson does a chop to the throat of an enemy. I'm gonna guess the number will be at least 20 — and I'll love every single one of them. In the latest issue of Empire, they interview Liam Neeson (god I'm so f*cking jealous) about the world of Taken and Taken 2.
Taken has retired CIA operative Bryan Mills going to Paris to hunt down his daughter (Maggie Grace), who was kidnapped and sold into a sex slave trade. He kills everyone in his path and gets his daughter back… and it was awesome. A sleeper hit. And according to this interview with Empire, Liam Neeson didn't see how a sequel would work because the storyline was unlikely.
Neeson states, "The first one for me was just a one-off. it was a huge hit, but I thought 'That's it.' Then Luc Besson came back and said, 'We want to do a sequel.' I said, 'come on, how can you possibly do a sequel? What, she gets taken again? It's crazy!'"
That's exactly the feeling most of my friends have when they heard of Taken 2. They loved the first but thought it was ridiculous that they could make a sequel. It would be the same thing all over again. The difference is that Bryan Mills and his wife (his exwife in the first), played by Famke Janssen, are the ones who are taken by the father of one of the kidnappers Mills killed in the first movie. Mills daughter is the only one on the outside who can help.
Neeson added about the storyline, "I'm able to, in a very covert way, instruct her to find out where I am being held because a sack's been put over my head and I'm in the middle of a f*cking dungeon! It's highly impossible yet equally possible."
What we don't know is if it's possible for Taken 2 to match the intensity and popularity of its predecessor. We'll have to wait til October 5, 2012 to find out, but you can bet that it'll be fun to watch Liam Neeson kick a bunch of ass all over again. And throat chops! Oh man those throat chops…
You can follow Movies and Culture Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ
[Source: EmpireOnline]
