Now showing: Taken 2 **

Stars: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace

Director: Olivier Megaton

Rated: PG

Showing: Liberty Theatre. Fri-Sat, 2:30pm, 6pm, 9pm; Sun 2:30pm, 5.30pm; Mon-Thur 2:30, 7.30pm.  

Runtime: 91 minutes

Action, crime, drama

Taken, the enormously successful 2008 thriller in which a retired agent gets his kidnapped teenage daughter back, was an explosion of middle-age machismo. Seeing Liam Neeson dish out some skull-cracking, back-snapping payback to every young thug in Paris proved to be a rollicking good time.

Now there’s Taken 2, which has the requisite abductions, speeding cars and Americans in danger on foreign soil, but the only ones truly taken for a ride are those in the audience. All that’s missing in this blatant money grab is a final shot of Neeson on a spending spree with his presumably large check.

Neeson returns as Bryan Mills, the ex-CIA operative living in Los Angeles where he hovers over his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), even though he no longer lives with her or her mother, Lenore (Famke Janssen). But things seem to be reheating between Bryan and Lenore and he plans to spend more time with his family when he returns from a three-day freelance security assignment in Istanbul.

Before you can say “bad idea,” mother and daughter decide to surprise Bryan in Turkey just as he’s ready to head home. Little do they know that Albanian crime boss Murad (the perpetually scowling Rade Serbedzija of X-Men First Class) is still ticked off that Bryan killed his son, who was one of Kim’s kidnappers. He vows revenge in Istanbul, unleashing a squad of tough guys to capture Bryan and his family.

While the original was predictable and hardly more believable, it got by on a propulsive energy from director Pierre Morel and a sense of surprise. This time out, fellow Frenchman Olivier Megaton (Colombiana, Transporter 3), working from a script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (both of whom wrote the first Taken), turns out a lethargic retread. Even the fight scenes are clumsily shot, making it hard to follow what’s happening.