You Won't Be 'Taken' With This Sequel

by Brett Parker

The accomplishment of Taken 2 is to make us strongly realize that this slam-bang action series is the most over-the-top fantasy release for divorced, middle-aged fathers that Hollywood has ever produced.  Lord knows that Liam Neeson busting skulls is an appealing commodity, but maybe the story of a square American who beats the crap out of half of Europe to become a hero in the eyes of his ex-wife and daughter has more personal homegrown resonance that we realize.  What’s telling is how smart grown-ups treasure Taken way more than teenage action junkies ever could.

I happen to fall into the category of those who were wildly thrilled by the first Taken.  Essentially, the sight of a dignified Irish thespian becoming a brutal kick-ass machine more impressive than Jason Bourne was all kinds of awesome.  That’s why it kind of pains me to report that Taken 2, while certainly not boring, fails to deliver the same kind of thrills and tension that were in full force the first time around.  While the script actually produces a promising idea for a sequel, it never builds on its clever ideas but tries for more of the same from last time without bringing the same thrilling effect this time.

Taken 2 continues the story of Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), a retired U.S. government agent who we last saw rescuing his daughter from sex traffickers in Paris, killing countless villains and wreaking havoc in the process.  The film begins with the Albanian relatives of the traffickers Bryan killed holding a funeral for all their murdered loved ones in their homeland.  The family patriarch, Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija), knows that Bryan is responsible for the death of his kin--including his son--and declares to all around him that they will have their revenge.

As Bryan vacations in Istanbul with his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen) and his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), Murad and his clan carry out their vengeful plan.  Bryan and Lenore are kidnapped and taken to a shabby holding house, whereas Kim is able to escape from her hotel room before trouble arrives.  Bryan is tied-up and told that he will have to watch Lenore die for all the lives that he took.  But Bryan is too skilled a survivor to just sit back and let that happen.  Using his highly-skilled government training, along with help from Kim on the outside, Bryan is able to untie himself and fight his way out of his holding area.  Once he’s free, Bryan wastes no time in getting his daughter to safety and trying to rescue Lenore, letting absolutely no one stand in stand in his way.

Things start interestingly enough with the Albanians-seeking-revenge angle, for it’s not only the most logical way to continue the story, but it also put a devilish twist on Mills’ idea about protecting your family at all costs.  Yet things go right out the window once we realize that the Albanians attack Mills with the same ineptitude as their fallen relatives.  If a guy single-handedly shot up half a country, killed half your family, and headed home untouched, wouldn’t you come up with a smarter plan of revenge than just tying him to a pipe and surrounding him with oafish thugs?  As Mills tears through his first batch of henchmen, the air goes out of the movie when we realize that this is all child’s play to him.  The first movie wonderfully conveyed a strong sense of nightmarish danger and impossible stakes that sustained suspense throughout, but this time we feel like Bryan will fight his way out of this situation just fine.

Director Oliver Megaton (Transporter 3, Colombiana) pretty much bungles all of the finer points that made the first movie rather distinctive (not to mention shamelessly steals songs from the Drive soundtrack to amp up this film’s coolness factor).  The sequel’s check-in with Bryan as a divorced family man feels more dopier than the last time around, probably because the screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (who also wrote the first Taken) doesn’t provide the weight and confessions we’d expect from a family who suffered a great crisis and is trying to move on.  Even the delicious exhilaration of watching Neeson pound on bad guys gets diminished here by shaky-cam work and frantic editing that’s among the most fast and furious I’ve seen recently.  Most of the action here feels a lot harder to make out than the last film, with jump cuts distorting a clear view of action.  This is especially frustrating in an alley scene where Mills is pounding on two thugs at the same time.  The camera shakes about so much that you wish it’d lean back and remain still so we can see all of Neeson’s impressive fight work.

One of the most interesting star image evolutions of recent memory has been Liam Neeson’s journey from distinguished, thinking-man’s actor to kick-ass action star.  The success of the first Taken made Hollywood realize that Neeson’s authentic combination of intelligence and toughness could create action gold, allowing him to churn out explosive thrill rides ever since.  If he keeps at it, then he could solidify a tough guy image every bit as memorable and reliable as John Wayne: a tall tower of masculine toughness peppered with no-nonsense gruff and straightforward smarts.

Whatever pleasure there is to be had in Taken 2 naturally flows from Neeson’s weathered gifts.  A Sherlock Holmes-like scene where Mills tries to figure out his surroundings in a van with a hood over his head nicely shows how his brains are just as exciting as his fists.  Yet when it does come time for some hand-to-hand smackdowns, Neeson delivers the goods.  My favorite scene is where Mills faces off with an Albanian who’s (almost) as good a brawler as he is.  It’s one of the few moments where the camera calms down and we can admire Neeson’s skilled yet brutal attack technique.  And while the screenplay tries to turn Mills’ strategic assessments into a kind of schtick, Neeson delivers a poignant speech towards the end about endless cycles of violence that brings the only moment of dramatic electricity within the violence.  

Taken 2 isn’t necessarily a bad product for the action junkie crowd, but it truly does elicit the usual criticisms one heaps upon weak sequels: “it’s not as good as the first one,” “it tries to be like the first one but fails,” and so on.  It’s far from being one of the biggest “sequel-letdowns” I’ve ever seen, but you’d have to be pretty damn delusional to think this flick is as good as the first one.  If anything, this film made me realize that if you or a loved one shoots up half a European country at some point, then perhaps its wise for you and your family to stay the hell out of Europe for the rest of your lives.  

Anderson is a 'Master' at Work

by Brett Parker

The unspoken truth about the very nature of religion is how gurus and disciples need each other in order for religion to even exist in the first place.  A preacher cannot preach if no one is around to believe in his words and a believer can only be a believer if a spiritual cause is arousing enough to inspire self-betterment within themselves.  No film probably understands this delicate connection better than Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a rich and hypnotic masterwork that examines the great unease and sneaky affection that develops between a questionable prophet and the troubled drifter who seeks his help.  The film is a fictionalized account of L. Ron Hubbard’s early days when he notably pioneered Scientology, but it could essentially be about any religion in the way it shows how spiritual practices assimilate with the human condition and how loopholes can pluck away at any foundation of worship.  While the movie gives off an alarming friction as man’s primal urges try to get tamed by enlightened psychobabble, a certain bizarre hope shines through in the end as we realize the backhanded ways we call upon spiritual beliefs to help us get through our lives.

The film opens with a sailor named Freddie Dodd (Joaquin Phoenix) returning home from World War II with deep stares and quirky twitches filled with mysterious pain.  Dodd appears to have a few screws loose but is nonetheless thrown back into society anyways to try and be a normal citizen in post-war America.  He tries to hold down a job as a photographer at a department store, but he drunkenly brawls with a customer and is sent away.  He tries working in a cabbage field, but his hobby of making homemade alcohol out of questionable products leaves one of his fellow workers poisoned, causing him to be chased away furiously from the farm.

One night, Freddie decides to stowaway on a random yacht he finds on his travels, which happens to be under the command of Lancaster Dodd, a writer and spiritual philosopher in the early stages of starting a new religion known as “The Cause.”  Dodd discovers Freddie hiding out on the boat, but decides not to throw him off, for he loves the taste of his hooch and senses an unexplainable connection between them.  Pretty soon, Dodd subjects Freddie to his own invented form of psychotherapy known as “processing” and is able to sense troubled depths within the broken sailor.  It is then that the Guru decides to make this damaged wanderer his ultimate test case and recruits him to help out with his newfound movement.

Pretty soon, Freddie becomes a loyal disciple of The Cause, helping Dodd and his steely wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), as they try to spread their beliefs throughout random parts of the United States.  Dodd returns the loyalty by subjecting Freddie to increasingly unorthodox practices meant to help him ease past trauma.  Yet as skeptics and obvious questions threaten the logical foundation of the Cause’s ideas while Freddie’s drunkenly erratic and shockingly violent behavior explodes in reoccurring bursts, Freddie begins to question the belief system he’s thrown himself into and wonders if aligning with Dodd is truly the best thing for himself.

As the film allows us a peak at early, midcentury America, the camera slyly recalls the cinematic look and feel of melodramatic Hollywood classics from that era while knocking things slightly off-kilter.  The gem-like cinematography by Mihai Malaimare, JR. and the reliably-acute production design by David Crank and Jack Fisk greatly summons the fragile beauty hinted at in the movies of that time which painted lush images of post-WWII America, yet the hostile and confusing behavior of the characters urgently suggests the troubling cracks in such a seemingly clean-cut landscape.  Jonny Greenwood once again treats director Paul Thomas Anderson to a transcendent score, (after his towering work on There Will Be Blood) that evokes classical arrangements from the traditional film scores of classical melodramas as if they were filtered through a nightmare to produce sounds of demented unsettlement.  

The script’s obvious allusions to L. Ron Hubbard’s early career have led early headlines to believe that the film would be a raw expose of the super-secretive Scientology religion.  While the film is not the low-blow whistle blower some obtuse moviegoers expected it to be, one can’t help but notice how it shrewdly conveys the impending mystery of such an organization.  Scientology is one of the most widely-debated religious phenomenas of our time.  To read up on the subject is to witness a brutal ping-pong match between its detractors and defenders.  Those who devote their lives to the cause swear that it’s the most enlightening, eye-opening life-changer thats ever happened to them while others claim it’s one of the most brutal, heartbreaking scams of modern times.  The film wisely doesn’t condemn or condone such a religious group, but instead veers between both ends of the spectrum throughout the film.  Strangely enough, the film’s in-between-ness on the subject perfectly encapsulates the religion’s aura from a basic, present day view.  

In one spellbinding sequence, Dodd subjects Freddie to his intense, half-hypnotic form of questioning known as “processing” that plunges the depths of Freddie’s frantic psyche and causes him to confront painful memories constantly gnawing at him.  At the end of the process, Freddie feels a certain sense of release and calm for the first time in the film, and we wonder if maybe Dodd isn’t onto something that could be quite beneficial to damaged human beings.  Yet in other scenes, Dodd grows erratic and furious when theories of his Cause are cross-examined with ideological scrutiny, giving off the obvious vibe of a man who is deeply unsure of himself.  One curious, prolonged sequence shows Dodd hiding out in an office moments before his latest spiritual manual, The Split Saber, is to be unveiled to his fellow Cause members for the first time and his face conveys looks of fear and uncertainty.  The film is never explicit as to whether Dodd is a complete charltan or just nervously trying to work out ideological kinks within the early stages of his bold creation.  Scenes of Freddie benefitting from the Cause’s methods in contrast with scenes of Dodd freaking out over naysayers keep us off-balance as to whether the Cause is beneficial or a complete crock.  

The Master once again has Paul Thomas Anderson creating a perplexing and hostile environment where vulnerable outsiders encounter calculating hustlers as they both desperately ponder the uncertainty of the world through their fragile alliances.  Their push-pull dances seem to satisfy inner needs of power and weakness until you catch on that they’re ultimately seeking validation in a remarkably unpredictable universe.  Like the freak climactic storm of Magnolia or the violent oil accidents in There Will Be Blood, fate can deal out random misfortune in the most unforgiving manner, and this has Anderson’s characters clinging to their personal connections to find a significance they can believe in.  

The Master is Anderson’s best play on this reoccurring connection yet, not just because the religious angle causes one to ponder this theme to the largest of extents, but also because the meeting between outsider and hustler here is at once the most complex and most tender its ever been in Anderson’s canon.  Freddie and Dodd have a burning need for each other that’s stronger than any connection between any Anderson relationship before, for if they’re dance of spiritual enlightenment proves to be a successful one, then they could justify each other’s existence in ways that no other entity on the planet could come close to doing.  The guru will have healed a disciple with his beliefs and the disciple would have found guidance of actual worth and so forth.  Yet this alliance between the two men turns out to be anything but solid as both Freddie and Dodd represent the duality of man as both an animal and a spiritual being, respectively.  Anderson brilliantly suggests the great difficulty and friskiness that arises when both ends of this spectrum try to meet in the middle in spite of their gentle willingness.  Freddie’s primal id may be too deep-rooted and elusive to tame while Dodd may be too cocky and narrow-minded to provide a foolproof base of religious guidance.  

Phoenix and Hoffman both turn in astoundingly compelling performances that sets off Anderson’s primary forces like firecrackers.  Phoenix especially swings for the fences and turns in a fearless display for the history books.  It’s one of those rare depictions of cracked madness where the performer goes to such scary heights to get their result that it’s both exciting and disturbing at the same time.  There’s something to be said for Phoenix’s strangely unique gifts in how he makes Freddie’s ferocious confusion sympathetic.  As the super-charismatic and curiously testy spiritual leader, Hoffman skillfully delivers an Orson Welles-like grandeur to the role that carefully veers between charming and volcanic.  The vibrant and affectionate connection between these opposite extreme performances sustains the movie throughout and damn near ignites the screen in a jailhouse scene where both characters release unhinged fury on each other (as Phoenix holds us in his visceral grip by thrashing his body around his jail cell).  It all eventually boils down to a sneakily heart-wrenching scene where Freddie and Dodd confront each other and ponder if they could truly satisfy their needs through each other’s souls.  The surprisingly touching part as how much they achingly wish that could happen.  

Like Officer Kurring in Magnolia and Barry in Punch-Drunk Love, Freddie is able to discover his own justified closure amidst the increasingly-chaotic world around him.  For all the trouble and confusion that the Cause wrought, Freddie is able to confront his own-problems with a hint of level-headedness.  The last scene shows Freddie half-jokingly trying out “processing” on a random bar pickup, and we don’t feel his silliness is meant to be spiteful but has given him a slight new way to be comfortable around people.  And perhaps that’s what The Master has been getting at all along: that in order to get through this messy ordeal known as life, sampling outside beliefs and filtering it through your own terms may just be the way to go.  For when Dodd tells Freddie, “if you figure out a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world,” what he may or may not realize is that striving to live without a master may be the most helpful method of all.  

'Looper': Killer Sci-Fi Tale

by Brett Parker

Looper is the first sci-fi film I’ve seen in many a moon in which the story trumps any special effects shots, actions scenes, or otherworldly art direction such a genre tale has to offer.  I consider this a great blessing, seeing as how Len Wiseman’s atrocious Total Recall remake put a serious dent on my faith in the genre.  Director Rian Johnson once again takes a dangerous movie environment and turns it on its ear, this time delivering his most assured and significant work yet.  He brings his sense of playfulness to a time travel plot that never gets confusing nor diminishes the dramatic impact of the story.  Inspired by The Terminator, Looper knows how to make mood and poignant emotions more important than the metaphysics.  

Looper imagines a future in which time travel has been invented, but its illegal due to the fate-tampering damage it could cause.  Yet in the year 2074, criminal organizations secretly use time travel to dispose of people they want eliminated.  Since bodies are harder to dispose of in the future, mobsters send their targets back 30 years into the past where a team of specialized assassins known as loopers are assigned to shoot these targets and leave no trace behind.  We follow a looper in 2044 named Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he blasts away his futuristic quarries who appear out of thin air and gets overly-compensated for his efforts.  The mobs of the future always send back plenty of silver with their targets, and these rewards allow Joe to indulge in clubs, drugs, and hookers when he’s not murdering hooded undesirables.

One day, as Joe prepares to kill his latest victim, he discovers that his latest time traveler victim is a future version of himself.  This Older Joe (Bruce Willis) knows exactly what he’s up against, so he uses his intelligence and ferocious fighting skills to escape Young Joe’s gun.  Loopers are supposed to kill their targets even if they are, in fact, their future selves, and the fact that Old Joe is on the run causes Young Joe to be wanted by the very organization that employs him.  Young Joe simply wants to get rid of his older self so he can stay alive and get back to his normal life, but Old Joe catches up with him and informs him that a dangerous criminal known as the Rainmaker will bring great harm into their life, and he believes he can track down the adolescent Rainmaker in Young Joe’s present and kill him.  A battle of wits ensue between both Joes as they try to satisfy their own desperate needs, with Young Joe finding shelter from a country girl named Sara (Emily Blunt) and her young son Cid (Pierce Gagnon) while Old Joe tries to hunt down youngsters who fit the description of a young Rainmaker.

Rian Johnson is a filmmaker who likes to bring unexpected flourishes to film noir tales.  His Brick brought a hard-boiled detective story to a high school setting while The Brothers Bloom saw him bringing quirky whimsy and yearning romance to a con artist game.  With Looper, he lets snappy time travel complications run amok in a future dystopia.  While most noir tales tend to focus on hoods, degenerates, and amoral everymen totally engrained in the darkness, Johnson focuses on broken people detached from and despairing of their sad worlds.  What his protagonists have in common is a yearning to leave their harsh environments far behind and discover happiness on their own terms.  While destinies in these cynical landscapes can be as pre-determined as a Greek tragedy,perhaps the motivation for Johnson’s characters was best exemplified in The Brothers Bloom when that film’s melancholy hero stated his need for “an unwritten life.”  While most directors are fascinated by the kinkiness and shamelessness of noir environments, Johnson seems most compelled by the crippling sadness underneath them and the emotional damage it inflicts on seemingly ordinary people.

When it comes to the future world of Looper, Johnson once again shows off his knack for lived-in noir atmospheres without making a big deal about it.  The future here isn’t decked out with super-advanced cityscapes and grotesque robotic claustrophobia, but shabby tent cities filled with countless vagabonds and festering urban decay.  This is not a future in which technology is thriving but desperation is festering, with homeless Americans hurting each other like wolves to protect their well-being.  As present day America is currently wrestling with political unrest and deep economic uncertainty, the scary thing about Looper’s future world is that its pessimism doesn’t feel terribly off from what could plausibly happen to this country under extreme circumstances (especially with the sick-joke-of-a-plot-point that China is the only place to be in the future).  The logical depravity of this scary American future tied with the self-reliant cynicism within most of the characters is a scarier cautionary warning than any recent political documentary trying to predict America’s uneasy future.  

Time travel plots can inherently bring about endless paradoxes, logical contradictions, and scientific confusion.  Looper deals with these issues by simply having the characters reluctant to get into specifics.  As Old Joe points out, talking out all the details means “we could be here all day.”  Besides, Johnson is clearly interested in such a plot to ponder what it would be like if a person came face-to-face with their future selves.  The inspired idea here is that both the younger and the older man probably wouldn’t be terribly fond of one another.  It’s typical of human nature that when we look into a mirror, we instinctively check for flaws.  Therefore, staring at an older version of ourselves would probably make us highlight all the bad things.  Ironically, both Joes are appalled by the same flaw under different circumstances: their need to carry out awful acts in order to protect their own lifestyles.  The centerpiece scene shows both Joes meeting face-to-face in a diner they frequent.  As both Joes lay out their underlying personal motivations, they grown angrier with each other by the minute, erupting into a brawl.  Johnson also plays up their tension using their obvious metaphysical connections, for Young Joe can communicate with Old Joe by scarring messages on his body, while Old Joe can see what Young Joe sees through the logic of memory.

Aside from the appealing time-travel spectrum here, Johnson even slyly introduces a “what if Hitler was raised differently” angle into the plot with the treatment of young Cid, who may or may not grow up to be an ultra-violent supervillian.  This subplot actually offers a rare hope in the film by shrewdly commenting on the future of today’s youth.  Cid figuratively suggests that if the confusion and anxiety of today’s youth is mixed with a chaotic and bitter society, then the violent egotism and moral ambiguity of our country could reach cataclysmic proportions.  The answer to this problem is suggested with the presence of Sara (obviously of the Sarah Conner mold), whose combination of no-nonsense feminism and maternal nurturing offers the perfect antidote to impending evil.  Cid is a symbolic visualization that if we put the well-being of the future before our own selfish needs, then perhaps we can solve the problems currently festering without our present society.  A key character comes to this same realization in the film’s shattering yet logical climax. 

One of the main draws of the film’s performances is seeing Joseph Gordon-Levitt drawing out how a young Bruce Willis would act.  Thanks to the prosthetic makeup artistry of Jamie Kelman and Kazuhiro Tsuji, Gordon-Levitt is given latex assistance to look uncannily like a young Willis, but it’s Levitt’s acute attention to Willis’ trademark mannerisms that really drives the clone job home.  Even so, Levitt is astounding at hinting at his character’s internalized uncertainties about the world and embittered core that yearns to do good in spite of spiritual confusion.  Willis rounds out the character’s effect by bringing his own sense of loss and bottled-up rage to the elderly side of the character.  Yet together as a team, they help build a whole spectrum of a man whose exhausted by a deadly world and trying desperately to salvage whats left of his heart.  As for the other performances, Jeff Daniels provides an interesting embodiment of a loosened, messy future as Young Joe’s boss, Emily Blunt delivers much-yearned-for feminine ideals in a world of overly-hostile testosterone, and Pierce Gagnon is simply astounding as Cid, eerily conveying a precious child with alarming shadows surrounding his soul.

Filled to the brim with surprisingly-intricate writing that keeps on giving, Looper will once again remind starving audiences about the pleasures of smart sci-fi.  Johnson is a filmmaker whose not afraid to mix seemingly incongruent genres together, and mixing a time travel tale with a bleak crime noir have energized each other with a surprising jolt you won’t soon forget.  With sci-fi cleverness and relevant ideological musings to spare, Looper shows that brains and excitement should always be tied together in an endless loop.