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Released in 2008, Taken came out of nowhere to earn $145 million at the box office on just a $25 million budget. The movie-going public recognizes fresh material when they see it. Taken was original, creative, driven, and hosted one of the most memorable protagonists in recent memory. Of course they would have to make a sequel to wring some more money out of Taken's fans.

A review of a movie sequel which starts outs praising the first installment instead of the new story is most likely not going to be very kind to the unfortunate title which ends in the number 2. Taken 2 keeps Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, Famke Janssen as his ex-wife Lenore, and the always relentlessly annoying Maggie Grace as his daughter Kim. Rule of thumb - if Maggie Grace is cast in your film, it will probably stink. This is her second feature film in 2012, after Lockout, so she is 0-2 this year. The bad guys are also mostly the same; they are the extended family of the first group of Albanians Bryan killed after they kidnapped his daughter and sold her into sex slavery. Now they want revenge; they must honor their dead sons and brothers. It doesn't matter that their sons and brothers were human traffickers, rapists, and murderers. Family honor is family honor ya know?

Bryan is growing close with his family again. After a few days of work in Istanbul as a heavily armed bodyguard, Byran invites Lenore and Kim to Turkey to take in the sights and relax in a very posh hotel. Fortunately for the Albanians, this is where they are going to kidnap Bryan, transport him back to Albania, and torture him to death. The introduction of mom and daughter is a cherry on top for the head bad guy Murad (Rade Serbedzija). He is older with grey hair; I mention this because all of the other couple dozen bad guys run together, he is the only one you will remember. In Taken, Bryan had it comparatively easy. He had one person to save and could methodically move through the ranks of thugs as he stabbed and shot his way to the top. Now, not only does he have to watch his own back, he must save both mom and daughter, sometimes alternating which one he can help at any given moment.

The original Taken was so good because of Bryan's practical and purposeful methods of extracting information, Neeson's deadpan delivery, and the ins and out of seedy Paris locales. Now take everything which made Taken a great movie and divide it by two. You already know the story, you know Bryan will talk slowly and concisely about how he has certain skills, and this time you get to suffer a bit more because Maggie Grace gets more screen time. The camera work also takes a nosedive during hand to hand combat. The camera shakes, jumps up and down, does some jumping jacks, and the average edit is probably .002 seconds. The audience has no hope of logically following who is punching whom or where a new bad guy springs up from. Scenes where Bryan fights with a loaded pistol are much easier to watch.

It's not that I'm mad at writer Luc Besson or director Olivier Megaton; they probably were under a lot of pressure to re-create the Taken magic. Unfortunately, they did not do a very good job. The story is only a bit laundered from the first one and everything else is merely imitation. Stay away from Taken 2, it will only remind you of its superior predecessor.

Time travel is confusing. Once you think you may have a grasp on it and have ironed out the 'what-ifs', a new paradox will pop up and collapse your argument which was a house of cards anyways. There are too many holes, and especially plot holes, when you try to rationally reason through what it means to travel through time and change the past. Once time travel is invented, hasn't it always been invented then? If you go back in time and change something, will you just disappear because your specific future no longer exists?

Looper sidesteps this whole enigma by having old Joe (Bruce Willis) tell his younger self that there is no use trying to figure it all out; it will just confuse you. This one statement immediately smooths out the conversation he is having with young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the audience's mental gymnastics, and while still leaving them right there in front of you, chooses to ignore the Grand Canyon sized plot holes. If you spend enough time with a pen and a sheet of paper, you will most likely identify a dozen or so glaring issues with jumping back through time, but where is the fun in that? With Looper, it is enough to recognize you have a creative story to watch and gifted actors to watch carry it out.

The year is 2044, not so far in the future to imagine teleportation and interstellar flight, but far enough to dream up new technology, weapons, and illicit drugs. 2044 is quite similar to today's reality, but its every day norms and today's extreme edges magnified by 1000. There are hover motorcycles, currency is literally based on gold and silver, and the drug all the kids are using is administered through eyedrops and appears to have the effects as cocaine. There is also some glaring income inequality, you either have money or you do not; there is no middle class. The city landscape shows thousands of people living on the sidewalks and sometimes in the middle of the street. If someone steals from you, it looks like you are allowed to pull out your personal shotgun and teach them a severe lesson.

Young Joe is a looper. At a specific time and always in the same place, the edge of a corn field, a hooded person will appear out of nowhere and all Joe has to do is immediately pull the trigger on his weapon and get rid of the body. These unfortunate souls are being sent back through time from 30 years in the future where time travel is illegal; therefore, it has morphed into a black market time travel system run by the mob. Young Joe is paid handsomely to do these simple tasks and spends the rest of his day and most of the night going to a club to drink, dance, take drugs, and spend time with Suzie (Piper Perabo), his favorite lady of the evening.

There are rules to follow though. Since the system is run by the mob, breaking the rules is frowned upon. I will not go into the rules because young Joe does a good job explaining to you what they are. In his film noir, gravelly voice, which is trying to match a young Bruce Willis in style, Joe opens the movie and brings you up to speed on what has been happening with the time travel business and his specific spot on the food chain. He has looper friends with Seth (Paul Dano) as his closest one and he gets called in to see the boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), from time to time. Other than that, young Joe is really running his own loop with his day job and his nightly activities.

Old Joe effectively ends that routine as soon as he pops into the corn field out of thin air. One would think that young Joe would have some questions or would want to cut his older self some slack, but no such luck. Young Joe enjoys his current situation and is in no frame of mind to have it messed with, even if it is a version of him doing the interrupting. Old Joe is on a quest to change the past and does not seem too pleased to run into his former self either. These two are the same man, but they certainly are different people. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is really the leading man here because Willis is in more of a supporting role and has noticeably less screen time; however, Bruce still gets top billing on the poster and in the credits. I wonder if that chafes Gordon-Levitt?

Both Gordon-Levitt and Willis are very good here. On one hand, they are playing the same person and must try and match each other's facial ticks and mannerisms, but on the other hand, Gordon-Levitt is playing a kid against Willis's older and yes, wiser, character. Another supporting character is Sara (Emily Blunt) but I leave it to you to discover her role. Sara is saddled with most of the slower scenes in the middle which drag on a bit, but it's good to take a break from Joe, both young and old, after awhile. Looper was written and directed by Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) who should be commended for sitting down and puzzling through what must have been a very arduous screenplay.

You will not understand the physics of how everything works in Looper (probably because the physics actually don't work), but you don't have to. Let young and old Joe worry about that. You just get the pleasure of sitting back and enjoying an original, thought-provoking, and well made sci-fi, action thriller.

Haywire has style, almost too much style. Since it is a Steven Soderbergh film, a certain amount of gloss and creative camera shots are expected, but Haywire has more gloss and polish than average. It also has in-your-face brutal violence. There are relatively few firearms; the violence is one-on-one mortal combat to the death between somewhat evenly matched opponents, even though one of the fighters is a woman. It's The Limey with extended camera sequences and an absolutely gorgeous protagonist.

Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is a private contractor with a particular set of lethal skills. You hire her to rescue hostages, take down gangs, etc… Her boss and ex-boyfriend, always a good combination, is Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) who sets up her missions. Their firm is hired by Alex Coblenz (Michael Douglas) who represents some nameless government agency and a State Department functionary with a very fuzzy role in all of this is Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas).

It does not really matter who works for who or exactly how each piece of the confusing plot puzzle is set up, the film focuses in close-up on Mallory and her quest to not only survive, but to achieve revenge. Mallory is being set up for murder. We do not know why but somebody wants her out of the picture. Is it Kenneth, Rodrigo, or Alex? Maybe it is even one of her co-workers, perhaps the physically capable but not so bright Aaron (Channing Tatum) or the suave Paul (Michael Fassbender). Figuring out who the puppet master is behind the curtain is also a small sub-plot; let's get back to Mallory.

Gina Carano shows zero emotion on her face, even after she head butts enemies, breaks vases on their heads, and chokes them out with her legs. In real life, she was a professional Muay Thai fighter before switching to acting. She was cast in the TV show American Gladiators, not the game show but the scripted one, which is where Soderbergh saw her. Screenwriter Lem Dobbs, who worked with Soderbergh previously on The Limey and Kafka, wrote the script specifically for Carano and I imagine the rest of the A-list cast raised their hands to join because they wanted to work with one of the best directors in the business. Douglas is back again after starring in Soderbergh's Traffic.

Soderbergh made some very specific and very effective choices in his version of a straight up action thriller. The shots are much longer than the standard blink and you miss a jump-cut editing style for fight scenes. Mallory is shown in what seems like minute long takes walking down the street detecting surveillance on her or driving a vehicle in reverse very fast. Audiences have been taught to expect quick second long edits during chase and fight scenes which make them appear faster and more hectic. Not in Haywire. The fight scenes are uninterrupted and gruesome slug-fests. The characters actually bleed and stumble around as they would in a real fight.

I also noticed the music and sound effects, or lack of them. Regular actions films tend to pump up the volume during chases and flying fists. Soderbergh turned the music off. The audience only hears grunts, fists colliding with jaws, and painful groans when they connect. When firearms go off, it actually sounds like a pistol shot instead of a tremendous explosion. I found myself really enjoying this minimalist and reality-based version of action scenes.

Steven Soderbergh has crafted a very different action film than audiences are used to here. This most likely hurt the box office in the end, but bravo to the man for attempting to show a truer, and more intense, version of what bodies go through during fights. The plot is immediately forgetful and secondary to the thrill of watching an extremely dedicated and talented female action hero go after the bad guys. Sit back and enjoy the ride.