Director: Olivier Megaton
Starring: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Rade Serbedzija
BRYAN – “If I kill you, your other sons will come and seek revenge?”
MURAD – “They will.”
BRYAN – “And I will kill them too.”
When the hero in an action movie ploughs his way through countless baddies, butchering and slaughtering them in the name of our entertainment (as well as whatever cockamamie reason the plot’s given him, of course), we never spare a thought for the families of the recently deceased.
After all, for every nameless terrorist, anonymous criminal and nondescript thug there’s a mother, a father and maybe even a wife and children somewhere mourning the death of a man who may have been a bit of a prick in real life but was always good to them at least. We’re usually never shown these devoted family members in films though, because it humanises the enemies and makes you feel sorry for them, when all you’re supposed to be thinking is “YES, chuck that fanny over the cliff”.
“There’s the prick who told me to change at Kennington”
This is the thinking behind Taken 2, which takes place a few months after the events of the first film. Naturally, in order for me to describe the plot you’re going to have to accept that there are a couple of very minor spoilers from the first film ahead (nothing that you couldn’t reasonably predict yourself though).
After Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) killed a load of Albanians on the way to his kidnapped daughter in the first Taken, the families of the deceased receive the bodies and vow to get revenge on the man that, in their eyes, butchered a village’s worth of young men. Through the traditional Taken plot methods (i.e. absurdly unlikely coincidences) they find Bryan on holiday in Turkey with his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) and daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). Read more »
Director: Carl Monson
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Real-Life Mental – The Swallow Hotel, Gateshead
Posted in Commentary, Real-life Mental on February 25, 2013 by chrisscullionThis is a review I’ve written for TripAdvisor, but it takes a couple of days to get a review approved on there. In case it isn’t for some reason, I decided to share it here too.
No work and all decay makes this a dull choice
I recently spent a couple of nights at the Swallow Hotel in Gateshead as part of a stag weekend. From Friday to Sunday I was witness to degradation, filth and shame… and the stag weekend was pretty dodgy too.
Upon arrival at the hotel we were checked in by an elderly lady who, while kind, was clearly jaded after years of stag groups passing through her reception area and acting like raucous ne’er-do-wells. After she gingerly handed me my room key (room 602, if you’re asking), I embarked on my Swallow adventure, starting with the dodgiest elevators in England.
This definitely wasn’t a recent photo.
The Swallow has two lifts, with buttons that give you an electric shock when you press them. One has doors that open so slowly it feels like the scene where the aliens emerge from their ship in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind every time you get out. The other whips the doors open with gusto, but feels like a yacht in a storm as it moves between floors, leading to a constant fear that it’ll break down, trapping you in the Swallow’s aging shaft for eternity.
Once I got to my room the Swallow’s “quirks” continued to introduce themselves. The large CRT television was missing the remote control (assuming it had one). “No problem,” I decided, “I’ll just control it using the buttons on the TV itself. Unfortunately, the buttons had been removed, leaving just holes where they should have been. Read more »
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