Three stars

Starring: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Rade Serbedzija, Luke Grimes, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, D.B. Sweeney

Case in point: “Taken 2,” which became inevitable after its 2008 predecessor turned into a surprise hit that earned $224 million in worldwide box office.

This new entry isn’t a bad film, per se; it’s simply unnecessary. It covers no new ground, except to soften the long-estranged relationships between Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) and his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), and their outrageously spoiled teenage daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace).

But that’s not the meat of director Olivier Megaton’s amped-up action thriller, which exists mostly so that Bryan can meticulously execute dozens of anonymous tough guys, who clearly flunked out of Thug School. Rarely have we seen such a careless, sloppy and unskilled collection of ruffians; even with automatic weapons, they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. They dishonor the tattoo that marks their clan.

In fairness, contrivance and coincidence also played a major role in the first “Taken,” but we weren’t quite as distracted by narrative implausibility; it was fun to see Neeson emerge as an unlikely but persuasively competent black-ops veteran. Mostly, Neeson’s Bryan was mesmerizing because of his shrewd and almost uncanny intelligence. Sure, he kicked plenty of ass, but mostly he out-thought his opponents. The concept felt fresh.

Yes, “Taken 2” finds a way to further explore Bryan’s smarts; scripters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen are savvy enough not to mess with success. But that’s the point; they also haven’t expanded upon that formula. In some ways, “Taken 2” feels less like a sequel and more like a remake; it suffers badly from a sense of sameness.

But to cases:

Things have indeed improved between Bryan and Lenore, in part because Stuart, her second husband — never seen and only referenced; I guess Xander Berkeley wasn’t available to reprise the role — has been exposed as a louse. Bryan still monitors Kim too closely, although most parents could forgive his paranoia; after all, she was kidnapped and almost sold into white slavery.

When Stuart bails on a planned family vacation, Bryan offers a trip to Istanbul; he has a bodyguarding assignment, and would be happy to share that exotic city with Lenore and Kim.

Ah, but Bryan doesn’t know about Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija), a Balkan whose son was one of many killed by our hero in the first film. Murad vows vengeance, both for his son and for all the other young villagers who were executed by this American; the fact that all these “sons, brothers and grandsons” were violent scum who kidnapped young women seems not to be an issue. Parents forgive all sins, I guess.

The plan involves a three-person snatch, but Murad’s goons are only partially successful; Kim manages to slip through the net. Even more conveniently, Bryan isn’t searched properly, and thus is able to call his daughter via a nifty little gadget concealed in one sock. For a time, then, the narrative comes to life as the cosseted Kim rallies and becomes an incredibly resourceful — and lucky — amateur operative.

Emphasis on lucky. Even though Besson and Kamen attempt to set up a logical means by which Bryan can remotely help Kim orchestrate a family reunion, the necessary suspension of disbelief will be beyond many viewers. The degree to which Kim successfully navigates her way through a wholly unfamiliar and quite confusing city — and so quickly! — won’t merely raise eyebrows; they’ll literally leap off your forehead.

Okay, fine; credibility never has been an issue with Besson, who I’m convinced is responsible for half the movies made in France these days. The writer/director/producer has a marvelous talent for marrying engaging actors with high-concept action storylines, going all the way back to 1990’s “La Femme Nikita,” which begat a film and TV franchise that hasn’t quit to this day.

Since then, Besson helped make a star of Jason Statham, with the “Transporter” series (three entries, and counting); he also paired Gary Oldman with young Natalie Portman in 1994’s marvelous “The Professional”; and dabbled in science-fiction (“The Fifth Element”) and children’s fantasies (“Arthur and the Invisibles” and its two sequels).

Besson is most at home with sizzling, high-octane — and highly improbable — thrillers such as “District B13” and, yes, “Taken.” And while Megaton may claim credit as director here — having also filled that chair with Besson’s “Transporter 3” and “Colombiana” — “Taken 2” feels every inch like a film Besson directed himself: lots of flash, plenty of explosions and gunfire, and a primal urgency fed, in this case, by a man’s devotion to his daughter and ex-wife. How can we not relate?

Neeson continues to be cool, calm and capable, always rising to the demand of a given crisis. He gives Bryan the emotional grace of a bull in a china shop, but that’s the nature of the character; this isn’t a guy who’s comfortable with his feminine side. Most crucially, he really sells the material; when he utters the fateful statement, during a key phone call with his daughter — “Kim, your mother and I are going to be taken” — we can’t help feeling the thrill.

As iconic statements go, with its variant well remembered from the first film, it’s a corker.

Janssen, happily, shows a softer side this time out; she badly overplayed the bitch card in the first film. Unfortunately, “softer” quickly morphs into “helpless,” which is rather insulting for entirely different reasons. It’s also weird how Bryan keeps charging off at key moments, leaving her “safely” behind, when in fact she’s anything but safe. Like I’ve been saying, stupid and contrived.

Grace, never an actress with much range, steps up reasonably well to her greater challenges this time out. One does tire, however, of hearing her squeal “I can’t!” every time her father tells her to drive faster, faster, faster, during the aforementioned car chase.

“What are you going to do?” Kim later wails.

“What I do best,” her father replies.

But that’s actually the problem: What Bryan Mills does best, this second time around, isn’t that interesting. His blindfolded navigation skills aren’t nearly as captivating as, say, Jason Statham’s dynamic physicality; Bryan only shoots and kills, shoots and kills. He never misses; his adversaries always miss. Pretty thin gruel for a sequel.

And what could be next? Will Bryan turn commando again when somebody snatches the family dog?

Really, Luc, you should have let this concept go with just one successful shot in the barrel.

— Read more of Derrick Bang’s film criticism at http://derrickbang.blogspot.com. Comment on this review at www.davisenterprise.com

“Battleship”

One star

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, Tadanobu Asano, Liam Neeson, John Tui

Rating: PG-13, for intense action violence, mayhem and profanity

“Battleship” is a movie for folks who found the “Transformers” flicks too intellectually challenging.

Erich and Jon Hoeber’s laughably moronic plot would make a great discussion topic in a fifth-grade science class, where 10-year-olds would gleefully pick it to shreds. Let’s start with preposterous coincidence, total ignorance of physical reality, and an invading alien force bearing nasty weaponry clearly capable of wiping us off the planet … except when the script says no, we can’t let that happen in this scene. Just because.

No lie: At times, for absolutely no reason, the massively armed alien warrior ships simply don’t fire upon our sitting-duck ocean vessels. Beats the hell out of me.

But, then, what should we expect from a film based on a board game?

The one-dimensional characters here, so insubstantial that I’d expect them to blow away in a stiff breeze, speak in clipped grunts that would have been retro in the Cro-Magnon age. I truly worry that if one of these folks attempted a three-syllable word, he’d forget the first by the time he reached the third.

Except for the token Scientific Geek, of course, who’s both a technobabble motormouth and a clichéd liberal wimp: We can’t have those wussies getting in the way of real soldiers determined to wipe this alien scum off the face of the Earth. John Wayne — who you’ll recall turned 1968’s “The Green Berets” into a notorious, pro-Vietnam War screed — would have loved this flick.

Actually, that’s always been one of my many objections to actor-turned-director Peter Berg. Bad enough that he makes dumbed-down nonsense apparently aimed toward trailer-trash intellectuals; he’s also jingoistic and frequently racist. His 2007 take on our American presence in the Middle East, “The Kingdom,” traded on wincingly offensive stereotypes, while suggesting that the whole problem could be solved if good ol’ American men and women simply shot every “towelhead” in sight.

Above all else, though, a director should direct … as in, elicit credible performances from his cast. That’s his job, right? Well, I guess Berg didn’t get that memo, because the acting in “Battleship” is conspicuous only by its absence.

I thought Taylor Kitsch scraped the bottom of the barrel as the mush-mouthed lummox hero of “John Carter,” but I was wrong; he’s even worse here. More often than not, he can’t even be bothered to enunciate properly; he mumbles his lines like Mickey Rourke on a bender … and sporting a mouthful of marbles. Kitsch also has no camera presence whatsoever; he just sorta hangs about from one scene to the next, as if waiting for somebody to tell him to empty the wastebaskets.

And a warning to all you Liam Neeson fans: Whatever you may have been led to believe, he’s barely in this film. His character, Admiral Shane, pops up a few times early on, only because he’s the father of Sam (Brooklyn Decker), who inexplicably falls in love with primary hero Alex (Kitsch) after he breaks into a convenience store to get her a chicken burrito … never mind the considerable property damage he causes in the process.

Uh-huh. Babes love that sort of devotion.

The story, such as it is:

After unwisely attempting to make contact with an Earth-like planet on the far side of the universe, everybody in D.C.’s Capitol Hill is stunned when a nasty outer-space squadron follows the signal back to our planet. (Object lesson: Don’t phone home if there’s a chance the distant relations won’t be happy to hear from you.)

The never-named outer space baddies plunge into the Pacific Ocean, close to Hawaii, just as navies from around the world have gathered for RIMPAC: the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the largest annual international maritime war games. Despite his screw-up past, Alex somehow has become a naval weapons officer on the USS John Paul Jones; his older brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgård), is commanding officer of the USS Sampson.

The central alien vessel immediately erects a huge, force-field “dome” that encloses their ships, the Hawaiian islands and only three RIMPAC vessels: the John Paul Jones, the Sampson and the Japanese destroyer Myoko, commanded by Capt. Yugi Nagata (Tadanobu Asano). All the other “good-guy vessels” are blocked from the action by the force dome.

The alien warcraft are equipped with two different weapons, but I don’t understand why they bother with the lethal “burrowing bombs,” which can reduce a battleship to flotsam and jetsam within seconds; the huge, razor-edged, spinning yo-yos wreak much more havoc, seem unstoppable and apparently have minds of their own.

Those gadgets immediately demolish all of our land-based aircraft, in a scene designed to elicit the discomfort of the Pearl Harbor bombing … which seems rather odd, in a film with a strong Japanese character fighting alongside us Ammuricans. (If I haven’t yet mentioned how tone-deaf this script is, now’s a good time.)

Somehow, Alex, boatswain Jimmy Ord (Jesse Plemons), Chief Petty Office Walter “The Beast” Lynch (John Tui) and Petty Officer Second Class Cora Raikes (Rihanna) manage to avoid being blown up or eviscerated by the bouncing yo-yos. Things get even more challenging when heavily armored alien soldiers also invade our vessels, but hey: No superior force is too overwhelming to be ignored when the script says it’s okay to do so.

I’ll give the brothers Hoeber credit for one clever scripting idea. For some contrived reason, the alien vessels don’t appear on Earth radar, nor do our vessels appear on theirs. (Don’t ask.) At night, then, both sides are radar-blind, which gives Nagata the clever idea to triangulate water disbursement via tsunami buoys, thereby “finding” the alien ships on a grid-like map that resembles — you guessed it — a Battleship game board.

Silly, yes, but this does lead to one of the film’s genuinely suspenseful sequences.

Back on land, alien soldiers surround our Hawaiian deep-space satellite grid, which happens to be where Sam — a physical therapist who helps rehabilitate military veterans — has been hiking with double-amputee Mick Canales (U.S. Army Col. Gregory D. Gadson, who lost both legs in Iraq in 2007, and makes a respectable acting debut here).

Will Sam, Mick and dweebish scientist Cap Zapata (Hamish Linklater) be able to prevent this massive squad of aliens from piggy-backing on our satellite transmissions and uplinking to their home planet? Does Decker look great in a jog-bra?

All this ludicrously dumb action is choreographed to a screaming power-rock soundtrack laden with songs by ZZ Top, AC/DC, Band of Horses, Creedence Clearwater Revival and many others. The subtext is obvious: Massive loss of life doesn’t matter a jot, as long as it takes place against some raucous pop anthems. Let’s hear it for the trivialization of weapons of mass destruction.

“Battleship” throws a lot of money on the screen, and it could be viewed as a gung-ho Navy recruitment film. Yes, it’s slick; it’s also superficial and utterly soulless.

And dumb, dumb, dumb.

— Read more of Derrick Bang’s film criticism at derrickbang.blogspot.com. Comment on this review at www.davisenterprise.com