TAKEN/ TAKEN 2 (20th Century Fox)

A violently absurd double feature from producer Luc Besson and star Liam Neeson, containing…

TAKEN (Two Stars)

U.S.’France: Pierre Morel,  2008

TAKEN 2 (Two  Stars)

U. S./France: Olivier Megaton, 2012 (20th Century Fox)

Taken may have been a surprise hit for star Liam Neeson back in 2008. But it was also absolutely ludicrous: a fast, dopey. lushly produced one-against-a-bunch action movie that gained what little dramatic credibility it had from Neeson’s admirably straight-faced performance as Bryan Mills, a super-skilled ex-C.I.A. op, and unstoppable killing machine who lets nothing get in his way, especially logic, while chasing and destroying the Eastern European crooks and terrorists who’ve kidnapped his too often ignored teen daughter Kim (Maggie Grace),

In the first Taken, Mills takes apart Paris. In this outrageous sequel, Mills and wife Lenore (Famke Janssen)   are kidnapped by maniac Murad (Rade Sherbedzija), who was mixed up in the first fiasco. Kim tries to find her parents, and her dad takes apart Istanbul, with all hell breaking loose after a touching opening where Murad holds a mass burial for all the people Mills killed in the first movie.

. For the next sequel, I guess Mills  can take apart Hollywood, after the rest of his family, and the actors playing them, are kidnapped by a maniac screenwriting team trying to force producer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton into concocting better lines and a more sensible story. A hopeless-sounding idea? Trust me. As long as Neeson can keep a straight face and a muscular torso, the audience may buy it. And if they don’t, there’s always Hong Kong or Beijing next time around.

WE’RE THE MILLERS (One and a Half Stars) U.S.: Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2013

Back in the 1990s, during the TV heyday of “Friends,” the sight of Jennifer Aniston doing a strip tease on camera probably would have been enough to set off fantasies and cultural shock waves of super-seismic proportions. What a disgrace? What a babe! What a bod! What moral decay! What heavenly hair! What an angelic…!

Sad to say, when the big strip tease number with Aniston comes in her new movie We’re the Millers, it’s a disappointment, a bust—just another misjudged sequence in a sort of daring but basically lousy movie comedy—a forced, crude, often senseless show about a group of misfits or outsiders (played by Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts and Will Poulter), pretending to be a typical American suburban bourgeois family (called the Millers), while smuggling dope across the border from Mexico,

None of the blame for this disappointing acrues to  Ms. Aniston, who still looks great, in clothes or out of them. But the take-‘em-off number—in which Aniston, as professional stripper Rosie O’Reilly, tries to discombobulate the vicious drug traffickers who supplied the two tons of marijuana now secreted in the Miller‘s RV—is too fast, forced and sloppynot funny, and not sexy enough. The rhythm is off in the strip, as it is for much of the movie  —  except for a few sequences with Nick Offerman as a benevolent D.E.A agent and Kathryn Hahn as his homespun (at first) wife.. Meet the Millers’ idea of a funny, audacious gag, most of the time, is to have Poulter’s Miller kid  pull down his pants to show us his scrotum, blown up to cantaloupe size after he’s been bitten by a scorpion.

The premise is third-rate pseudo-Farrelly stuff. Sudeikis, in a full attack of smarminess plays David Clark, an affable, shaggy, glib dope dealer who loses all his ganja-gotten gains one night while coming to the aid of a young neighbor (Poulter as super-doofus Kenny Rossmore) threatened by some low-lifes. Stripped of both his dough and his pot by the delinquents, David later tries to square things with his supplier and ex-college buddy Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms, who out-smarms Sudeikis). Gurdlinger offers his old pal an option: smuggle that couple of tons of pot in from Mexico in the R. V., while pretending to be a solid, clean-cut citizen named Miller.

Convinced he can’t be believably straight without a “family,” David hastily recruits three other Millers: Aniston‘s hard-bitten ecdysiast Rosie as the mama, Poulter’s neurotic and virginal Kenny as the son, and Roberts’ runaway street kid Casey Mathis as the daughter. This foursome turn out better at being bourgeois than you’d guess, until a nasty plot twist gets unloaded at the hacienda of drug czar Pablo Chacon (Tomer Sisley) and his number one thug, the scary-looking One Eye (Matthew Willig). Soon, The Millers, or “The Millers,” are on the run and hooked up with D. E. A. guy Fitzgerald (Offerman) and his spouse (Hahn) and his daughter (Molly Quinn), who will learn much more the perils of driving an RV full of marijuana, in a story where  guns and chases, phony incest gags and scrotum jokes abound.

A few questions emerge from this cannabis-laced mountebankery. Why would any self-respecting pot trafficker, even as devious a miscreant as Gurdlinger, conceive such an idiotic scheme (the two tons of pot aren’t paid for), a plan that seems likely to fail completely and get them all killed, himself included? Why does David entrust his life and future to the dubious hands of a dame who dislikes him, a troubled kid and a homeless runaway? Of course, it can be argued that movie comedies are full of characters that behave stupidly, put themselves in compromising positions and into mortal danger, and somehow evade arrest or death. But there’s an art to setting up these situations, and that art is almost lacking in We’re the Millers.

The notions or morals behind the movie, as written by a tag-team and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (director of the Ben Stiller–Vince Vaughn sports farce Dodgeball and the arty The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) seem to be that these ersatz phony Millers have a greater aptitude for “normality” and straightness than we thought, that the actor playing the D. E. A. agent in a dope comedy, will probably steal the movie (unless it’s a show by Cheech and Chong), that sex and pot both scramble your mind, and any plot device, however imbecilic, will be accepted by an audience hungry for entertainment, or pot, or sex, or all three and that movies about pot should be legalized for their medicinal value, especially in complaints involving the scrotum. Also, that if you hire Jennifer Aniston for a role that requires her to strip-tease, you should let her tease as well as strip. Slower, slower…

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