The sequel nobody asked for.

So there’s an official trailer out now for Boondock Saints 2, and it’s baffling. Troy “Biggest Asshole in Tinseltown” Duffy has been threatening to make this movie for a couple years now and, as much as I enjoyed the original, I could never figure out why. See, some movies just don’t need sequels. Boondock Saints’s story wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was complete. You saw a few wild gunfights, you saw Willem Defoe in drag, it gets capped off with the legendary courtroom scene and then roll credits to folks on the street being interviewed about their city’s new living legends. The story can stop there. It has to stop there. Any possible development after that point brings the characters back down to mortal levels, when the whole point of the film was seeing two regular men become something extraordinary.

That, and the trailer just doesn’t… look very good.

I finally watched Taken last night and, like the rest of the Internet, I was enraptured by it. Instead of watching it again immediately I went online to read about it on IMDB and Wikipedia, which has become part of my post-exposure habit when it comes to films. During my journeys I came across this comment: “Robert Mark Kamen revealed that a sequel for the film is already in the works.”

Huh? How does that work? Taken 2: The Takening? Taken Again? Re-taken? How is any possible sequel to this movie going to be anything but very artificial? If it uses all the same characters it’s just going to come off as remarkably corny. “My daughter has been kidnapped… again! This time in Shanghai! By ninjas!” And if it doesn’t, why even label it as a sequel? It’s not even like they could use the original characters in a new situation; Liam Neeson wasn’t a special ops commando who specializes in kidnappings, but a father who went on a rampage looking for his daughter. It’s not going to be possible to bottle the lightning a second time unless they bottle the exact same lightning.

Wait, I’ve got another one: Taken 2: Indian Giving. Oh lawdy.