It’s been announced Liam Neeson is coming back for Taken 2, the sequel to the 2008 surprise hit featuring Neeson as Bryan Mills, a former spy that takes off for Paris to save his kidnapped daughter. However, original buzz was Neeson wanted to take some time off while producer Luc Besson wanted to shoot it this year. Names including Mickey Rourke, Ralph Fiennes, Ray Winstone, Sean Bean and Jason Isaacs were reported as potential replacements, which, if you ask me, would have been the better way to go, but that’s beyond the point.
In the Deadline article reporting the news, Mike Fleming refers to Neeson’s Taken character as a “signature role” which had me scratching my head. A signature role? Really? The Oscar-nominated title star of Schindler’s List‘s signature role is as a B-movie spy that has to save the girl from “Lost” from a bunch of Albanian sex traffickers? Shocking.
There’s no doubt Taken was a hit. Made for a reported $25 million it took in $226 million worldwide. Neeson’s ability to draw an audience as an aging action star was also proven with the recent success of Unknown, which was made for reported $30 million and has brought in $96 million worldwide.
So is that it? Has the soon-to-be 59-year-old actor found his calling as a late term action star?
Now I’m curious to see what kind of business Taken 2 will do. Robert Mark Kamen is back to pen the script and Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3) is set to direct with plans to shoot late 2011 or early 2012 giving Neeson the time off he wants after filming Wrath of the Titans.
Of course, my biggest concern, in terms of the movie itself, is they’ll somehow force a rehash of the first film and Neeson will again need to save a child/loved one/friend/whatever from being kidnapped. Maybe he’ll still be doing security jobs with his friends and one of their celebrity pop stars will get snatched up. Maybe it will even be his daughter (no word on whether or not Maggie Grace is coming back). Either way it seems Megaton may be the right director for this since the Transporter series crashed and burned with his third installment, maybe he can kill this “franchise” before it even gets to its junior year.
