Blu-Ray Review: ‘Taken’ 2 Disc Extended Cut

What better way to start off this review than to give you this quote from the film:

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

Seriously that is probably in the top ten of my favorite quotes of   all time. Liam Neeson delivers it with utter perfection when he is faced with his daughters captor on the phone after having to listen to his daughter being kidnapped.

The Movie:

Bryan Mills, Neeson, is a former spy who is desperately trying to rebuild the relationship he has with his daughter caused by the strain of his previous career choice. After hesitantly agreeing to let his underage daughter go to Paris without proper parental supervision, his suspicions are confirmed when she is “taken” from the home she was visiting with her friend before they embark on their European city tour.

Having to rely on the skills he picked up as a spy he sets off to Paris to retrieve his daughter from the Albanian gangsters who have put her into their human trafficking ring.

Liam Neeson seriously kicks some ass in this movie and after you are finished you just want to see it again because he does such a tremendous job in this role. This is a movie that I would love to see going into a franchise like the ‘Bourne’ trilogy. In fact they should have stopped after 1 ‘Bourne’ movie and just made a bunch of these instead.

The Blu-Ray/Bonus Features:

Like most Blu-Ray DVD’s this one boasts a bunch of bonus features that you just cant resist buying them for. Not to mention you get to see Liam Neeson kick ass in glorious High Definition. The images and sounds litterally jump off the screen and the 5.1 is epic. Listening to this on a good surround system will really suprise you because it has a bunch of quite moments and then bursts into actions scenes. It might eventually make your ears bleed!

With this DVD you get both the Theatrical and Unrated versions of the film. I watched the Unrated first, then went back and watched the Theatrical again only to realize that I cant tell a difference between the two. I set out to google to see the difference and there is 2 additional minutes in the unrated version but I have no idea where.

There is a really great Making of featurette on here called “Le Making Of“. Unfortunately its only about 18 1/2 minutes long but still impossible to ignore because its packed with Liam Nesson interview snippits about making the film. Since he is missing from all of the Audio commentary tracks this is a decent substitute.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5