Welcome to a new, recurring feature here on WOT: “It’s Called Writing (It’s Not Hard).”
Each instalment of ICW (INH) will explore the boneheaded decisions and baffling logical gaffes made by so-called “professional” Hollywood writers.
This edition: TAKEN 2!
A MISSED OPPORTUNITY
This case study is quite painful for me on a personal level. Not because I’ve ever had a family member “taken,” but because I f**king loved the first Taken. That movie was such a pleasant surprise – a B movie through and through, and yet one of the few lower budget action movies to land every leap perfectly, completely transcending its modest prospects.
Neeson’s “I will find you” speech had the whole world of action movie fans hooked as soon as they saw the trailer – and fortunately the rest of the movie lived up to that killer intro. The film is just endlessly watchable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlYcaSvfYWw
Liam Neeson’s wooden acting suits the movie perfectly and even his daughter’s bizarre “I’m seventeen but act ten” stupidity can’t take you out of the movie (seriously, the way that actress runs, arms and head flailing all over the place, is just so astounding to behold).
Taken thus falls into the category of “Perfect B Movie,” joining the revered ranks of such movies as Terminator, Predator, Die Hard, The Thing, Executive Decision, Uncommon Valor and Léon. The truly great thing about the film is that almost everything is believable. There are no crazy James Bond flights of fancy here – just point A to point B to point C.
Aside from the one instance of BS “coincidence-writing” – where Neeson isn’t just shot right away and escapes from being chained to an overhead pipe by a convenient stroke of luck – the logic of the story is pretty tight.
By the time this lapse in logic occurs, you have already been won over by the film’s steady supply of cool as f**k set pieces anyway, so whatever. I mean, Neeson shoots his friend’s wife! That’s cold, man – but totally believable for both the character and the situation.
Now, when I heard they were planning on making a sequel I groaned inwardly and tried to will myself into an alternate reality where they decided against this course of action.
Alas, my will proved wanting.
If you remember the above list of perfect B movies, only one of them has a good sequel. Them’s pretty bad odds.
Still, when Taken 2 was released to home media (no way I was gonna pay to see it in the theatre) I decided to give it a shot. I knew there was no chance a sequel would be as good as the original, but I was totally taken aback by just how lazy and stupid the inciting incident turned out to be. I honestly don’t think Besson wanted to make a sequel, and it shows.
In interviews, he seems fully aware of how difficult it is to plausibly continue the story of a movie like Taken. I think the challenge of coming up with an idea eventually proved to be too much for him and so he ended up deluding himself into believing he had found the solution.
Neeson’s character, Bryan Mills, kills a whole lot of bad Albanians (are there any other kind?) in the first film. So Taken 2 begins with the father of the lead bad Albanian dude deciding he wants revenge on whoever his killed his son, Marko. From Tropojë.
Activate eye-rolling. Initiate barf.
I’m pretty sure everyone’s first reaction to this was “booorrrring!” Hollywood writers fall back on this scenario all the time, unfortunately. They used the same angle in the third Die Hard; it was lame then, it’s still lame now, it will always be lame. You just feel let down. You feel as uninspired to watch the film as the screenwriter obviously was to write it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is a completely believable premise – like, for sure, a father would want to avenge a son’s death – but as a plot for a sequel it falls kinda flat. No matter how logical, you can’t escape the fact that this is still heavily re-treading the events of the first film.
In most cases involving sequels, we want totally new characters and situations, dammit! Maybe if the father had been featured in the first movie, or maybe if he had been f**king mentioned at all:
MARKO
You know, if anybody kills me, they will be super sorry ‘cuz my dad wouldn’t like it and he is a very revengeful mutha-f**kah.
Even on a purely sub-conscious level, you sense that this plot device is not very inspired. Somehow it smacks of desperation, and you can literally feel the panicked sweat from the pages of the script seeping into the frames of the film.
A previously unknown father of a character from the last film! Mills’ daughter is threatened with being taken – again! And so is his ex-wife! That’s two people threatened with being taken! Taken Two – literally! Taken Too!
That’s too cutsey a title though. They should have called the film Taken! Again!
Then, we could have had the pop singer from the first film added to the mix for:
Taken! Taken! Taken!
Next, everybody’s taken – including the karaoke machine salesman – by aliens this time:
Taken 4Ever
And finally, we’d have the final, last gasp sequel take place in 2049:
Taken! Infinity!
I mean, you just can’t do this. You just cannot have his daughter and ex-wife directly involved (this is like making Speed 2 by having Dennis Hopper’s brother show up to get revenge on Jack by putting another bomb on another bus ridden by Sandra Bullock).
You wanna bring the daughter back into the plot in a later film? Fine. But wait one f**king film at least! She could join Mills, sure, but she sure as f**k can’t get taken again. And you can’t use the ex-wife, either, sorry.
Sadly, this laziness just oozed right down the line, like stupidity molasses, through every nook and cranny of the script. So much of the film feels like they took the Albanian compound scenes from the first film and just made a whole second movie out of them.
And then there’s that riff on the abduction scene from the first movie where Mills tells his previously taken daughter that her mom and dad are now about to taken. Easily one of the most unintentionally hilarious screen moments of recent memory. So much Taken!
I can’t even talk about the super über-cliché of the bad guys using a found business card to lead them to Mills’ Parisian buddy. At least it wasn’t a f**king matchbook.
This kind of thing perfectly illustrates how bad the whole revenge-father angle is – if you have to stretch this hard and use ridiculous over-used motifs that were cliché in the 1950’s, then your idea is stupid and should be abandoned.
There is some cool inventive stuff, like using the sound of the grenades to zero in on his location, but not enough to wash away the taste of the lame-o premise.
This sucks! I wanted to like this damn movie! I would have been overjoyed if they somehow managed to turn this into an enjoyable franchise of trashy-great films! Bastards!
Surprisingly, the screenplay for Taken 2 was crafted by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen – the same two guys who wrote the first movie. The same guys who crafted one of the most iconic speeches in recent film memory, not to mention one of the most intense abduction scenes ever conceived for film.
So what happened? Was this just a onetime instance of catching lightning in a bottle? Well, yes. But the goddamned franchise could still have become a watchable diversion and effortlessly saved from stupidity – if they hadn’t overlooked the most obvious and logical direction for the series to take.
The Road Not Taken
If you think back to some of the most harrowing images of the first movie, you don’t think of the revenge-violence or the car chases. You recall the horrible scenes depicting the abduction and the kidnapped women shown strung out and dying or dead, as well as, the “luckier” ones sold off to the highest bidder in a putrid underground flesh-market.
These are the scenes Besson and Kamen should kept in mind when crafting the sequels. Instead, they just couldn’t see past the family as a way to involve Mills and so ended up simply re-hashing the first film’s plot.
The first film shows us at least a dozen young girls who are all in the same predicament as Mills’s daughter. You can certainly extrapolate the number of victims per year to be in the dozens, maybe even hundreds.
Now, understandably, Mills is on a single-minded mission to save his daughter at this point and that’s his primary goal – as it should be. Any father would move heaven and earth to save his child from unspeakable horrors. Especially one with a “particular set of skills.”
The flaw in the franchise’s follow up is that once he rescues his daughter, he basically says “Welp, my work here is done, now off to live our new, happy lives!” The first film’s coda is even a scene showing Mills’ daughter being welcomed into the world of a professional pop singer. Perfect! Isn’t life grand once you’ve been un-taken?
Um. What about all those other girls?
Too bad for them I guess.
Mills saves his daughter and we all leave the theatre with a smile, thrilled that this B movie turned out to be such a bad muthaf**kah. But once his daughter is home safe and he has recovered from his ordeal, what’s the next logical step for this character? What would be the next logical step for any sane, moral person with human feelings?
Well, a normal person would probably be haunted by what he’s seen. He’d want to raise awareness of the plight of such kidnap victims. Maybe go on CNN or something. A guy with “special skills,” though? A guy with all kinds of government, CIA, black ops connections?
A guy like that, properly motivated by, say, almost losing his daughter to human traffickers – he’d go on to become a “nightmare” for other trafficking networks. And who wouldn’t pay a guy like that to go after their own abducted sons and daughters?
Mills even tells his daughter he is a man who used to prevent bad things from happening to people. That was his job. One that he obsessively felt compelled to pursue – to the detriment of his family. This is something he cares about, deeply. I’m pretty sure a man like Mills isn’t going to turn a blind eye to human trafficking once he has personally witnessed it firsthand.
We have to assume he was debriefed by the French authorities and they immediately went and shut it all down and cleaned house of all the corruption and bad cops. We aren’t shown this, or told this, but let’s assume. That would be logical, right? And we like that.
But even if that’s what happened, Paris is just one city. This would have been just one such network. This kind of sh*t still happens in other cities around the world. And let’s not forget about all the girls who had been sold before Mills got there – the ones for whom 72 hours have already elapsed.
The perfect way to end the first movie would have been to have Mills wake up one morning in a cold sweat, still haunted by the memories of all the other women he didn’t save – particularly his daughter’s best friend. Jes*s Chr*st, how could he not be haunted?! How do you just go on with your life?
Taken was just a movie and yet I’m still left with a lingering dread about Albanians (just kidding) – so what would happen to a guy who experienced these atrocities in real life? You end with him either receiving a phone call – or making a phone call – à la the scene with Ripley in Aliens where she wakes from a nightmare and says “Fuck it, let’s go fix this.”
INT. MILL’S APARTMENT – EARLY MORNING
Mills is in bed, deep in the throes of yet another horrible nightmare. The phone rings. Mills wakes with a start and fumbles to find the phone.
MILLS
Yes.
CALLER
Is this Bryan Mills?
MILLS (groggy)
Yes.
CALLER
The same Bryan Mills who went after his daughter in Paris?
MILLS ( alert)
Who is this? What do you want?
CALLER
The same thing as you. I want to be able to sleep at night.
Close on Mill’s reaction.
Cut to credits.
Who is the caller? What is his proposal? I don’t have a f**king clue, but Luc, if you’re reading this, I’d be happy to figure it out and write up a script for Taken 4: Taken Some More. I’m ready to go.
Now, there was no way they could have known at the time the film was gonna be a perfect home run, so ending the film this way, while perfect, just wouldn’t have entered their minds. The sequel, however…well, that’s the epic tragedy for this franchise.
If the sequel had began this way, I would never have had that “um, this is f**king lame” moment that instantly killed the second film for me. Instantly! Like – at the trailer stage! Had they come up with a logical and original way to continue the series – without just having his family show up and get taken again – this franchise could have some serious legs.
Neeson could have played Mills for six more goddamn films – he was born to play this kind of role, and because the Taken sequels produced such diminished returns, he was forced to transfer his newly minted Taken character into other Taken-clone films. Why in the f**k was Non Stop not a Taken film? Ridiculous.
Once you get the second film up and running on believable and original legs, then you can still work in the father-revenge angle if you so choose. Patriot Games used this angle well – within the overall narrative of the first movie, not as the main plot device for the sequel.
What if Clear and Present Danger had just been Patriot Games 2, where Sean has another brother or a mother or a cousin who now wants revenge on Jack Ryan – again. You really have to avoid the word “again” as much as possible in your movie’s synopsis.
If you really, really feel like you need some of the characters from the first film to keep your audience, then fine. Mills’ ex-wife’s new husband is shown to be loaded – well, she could help front Mills the money to get some new operation up and running, thereby keeping her in the picture.
As for the daughter, you could involve her as well. Here’s how that could go:
KIM
You’re leaving again, aren’t you? For how long this time?
MILLS
I don’t know. As long as it takes.
KIM
We were just starting to get to know each other again.
MILLS
I know, Kim. I’m sorry. But this is a real chance to stop these people. I don’t have a choice.
KIM
Neither do I. That’s why I’m coming with you.
I’d absolutely believe that Kim had serious trouble adjusting to normal life again and begged her father to train her in self-defence. I’d totally buy that she would become obsessed with helping all of the others who had been abducted and sold into slavery. I would be surprised if she didn’t want to become more like her dad, resourceful and dangerous as f**k. This would create a bit of a Professional/Léon vibe, something Besson wouldn’t mind, I’m sure.
Bring the kid back for the third or fourth movie, if you must. Have her slowly develop into a badass of her own. Some of Kim’s scenes in Taken 2 were actually pretty cool – it just doesn’t matter because the entire foundation of the movie is built on such sh*tty ground.
Invest in the character and then let that investment mature before just jamming her back into an unbelievable story and ruining your entire franchise.
I’d like that angle a hundred times better than she just accidentally gets involved once more when she randomly comes to visit her dad while he’s on assignment in f**king Istanbul. Hell, I’ll play along with having her character stick around as long as neither she, nor Mills’ wife, become a target for getting taken ever, ever again! F**k that.
So there ya go. The simple and logical fix that was staring the writers right in the face yet somehow eluded them entirely. Sad.
There’s no excuse for lazy writing. There is always a way out of a narrative bind. There is always a logical fix.
It’s called writing. It’s not hard.
Until next time, stay vigilant! Od’s blood!
I AM FERGUS THE JUSTIFIER!
Follow me @FJustifier
