Taken 2 was pretty mediocre. I liked that the daughter got a chance to be the hero. I liked the idea of the relatives of the guys Neeson killed in the first one wanted revenge and were well aware of their relatives' actions. "This guy was scum, but he was still my son" basically. As far as "sequel for a movie that shouldn't have a sequel" goes, the ideas behind it were perfectly fine. But the action scenes were lousy. That's no different from the first movie, since they were pretty meh then too, but they lacked the oomph of the first one. Too many generic gun fights and not enough Liam torturing some bastard to get information. Everything was centered around Istanbul, so the scope wasn't quite as broad as the first movie. That made everything feel way too small, but not in a claustrophobic or intimate way. Just kinda cheap. And the villains didn't have the same sense of escalation as the first movie. The first one started with the ground level kidnappers, and Neeson had to work his way up the distribution channels until he found the guys who bought his daughter. In this one he's just taking on a small group of revenge-seekers. It's a big step down in scale, just like the setting is another step down. It's perfectly watchable, but it almost seems like they went out of their way to make it a lesser thing in every possible way.