Look. Let’s not pretend this is a movie that can be ‘reviewed’. Let’s stipulate that everyone in the theater is perfectly aware of the kind of flashy garbage that Oliver Megaton produces, and paid the ticket price to have their limbic system bathed in a warm broth of smug, unexamined cruelty and pretty ladies in temporary peril.

This time, Brian (Liam Neeson) is being hunted by the patriarch of the gang that stole his daughter. If you’re just joining the series, know that in the first film Brian’s daughter is snatched from her vacation by shady Albanians with the foulest of intent – they are in the sexual slavery business. Brian, who has a particular set of skills (mostly Bourne-Fu and grimaces), goes nuts, kills everyone and gets his daughter back.

The patriarch of the lady-slave ring is having trouble moving on from his son’s death at Brian’s hand. He swears revenge, making quite a few moving speeches about the pain and suffering that Brian wreaked on his peaceful little community of murdering daughter-stealers, and how his son’s blood cries out for justice and suchlike.

To get Brian’s family close enough that the badguys can make a move on him, the plot contrives to have our hero invite the ex and his daughter to stay with him for a while. In Istanbul. For a vacation. As if the first movie never happened.

Of course this means that in short order the badguys get their hands on Brian’s ex, just as the couple was sailing toward some sort of reconciliation. Then they get Brian. Then they try to get his daughter, who is somehow both in high school and in her early thirties.

You know what happens next. Brian folds, spindles and mutilates a host of undifferentiated Albanian thugs. Random touches like clocks and grenades artificially up the ante every few minutes. Good (tall Westerners with good skin) triumphs over evil (random scowling ethnics) Brian earns his moment with the patriarch.

This is where it gets a little strange. For just a moment, ‘Taken 2’ flirts with an actual idea. Brian offers to let it all go – to forgo his right to revenge. He realizes the loop he’s trapped in, and he wants out. It’s an interesting moment: handled correctly it could produce a novel ending that addresses what kind of man Brian has become by spending his life chasing villains.

Megaton doesn’t rise to this challenge. The moment disappears gently beneath a cheap laugh and an anticlimactic murder, leaving no trace on our marinating underbrains.

The way is left open for ‘Taken 3: Straight Tooken, Son!’ This is a terrible idea. It is a terrible idea that I will probably watch. Listen. I don’t need your judgment.