“Buddy, what’s happening? How’s the weekend?”

“Hey dude, same old. But, I did see this movie—the one produced by Luc Besson? The guy that directed Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element. Oh, that’s what it was—Taken 2, with Liam Neeson.”

“Man, I loved the first Taken! When he plays Bryan Mills, that retired security specialist that wreaks havoc and gets his daughter back from these European gangsters? It was like watching my dad play a secret agent. I loved that!”

“Yeah, this one is kind of similar, but even more awesome. This time around though, all the leftover gangsters from the first movie want to kill Mills because he killed their gangster friends. While he’s in Istanbul with his family, they go all… well, Taken on him, and grab him and his wife, while his daughter helps out.”

“I don’t know, it sounds pretty much like the first movie… I mean, even the bad guys are the same, right?”

“Well, yeah, but this time, there are all these subplots. Like, he’s getting back together with his ex-wife, and his daughter can’t drive and has a boyfriend—so I connect with it more now. Now that I think about it, I guess they’re all pretty lame, and don’t really serve the story, but at least there’s some filler there, right?”

“Uhhh… I don’t know dude, sounds kind of weak. What about all the action, was that decent? The first one had some cool sequences, this one must have some of those too, right?”

“Oh yeah, for sure! I mean, I think it did. It was shot all shaky and close up, so you couldn’t really see what was going on during the fights and car chases. But then again, that’s what it feels like to be in the middle of the action, right?”

“Yeah… I’m not so sure. It sounds like it was just a poor call on the director’s part.”

“Well, that could be. But dude, the script was really sharp. Neeson used this really clever thing where he got the daughter to throw grenades all over Istanbul so that he could hear where they blew up and calculate where she was, so that she could find him and bring him a gun. They did that for about 15 minutes, which was a little repetitive I guess, but—”

“Wait, wait, that’s not a sharp script at all. That’s lame. Did it have any cool dialogue, at least? The first one had that awesome line that everyone always remembers, the one where Mills says ‘I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what you want, but if you don’t let my daughter go, I will find you and I will kill you.’”

“Yeah, I mean, he’s taken in this one, so he doesn’t really have a chance to make threatening phone calls. I noticed that he gives really good directions over the phone, which, you know, is super rare, so that was kind of cool.”

“Dude, my dad is terrible at directions.”