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Reviews
Taken: The Search for Sophie Parker (2013)
I will look for you, I WILL find you...and I will copycat you.
If you are in any way familiar with the movie "Taken," you will find the similarities between it and this movie to be either insulting or laughable. They didn't even have the decency to come up with a unique title; they just stuck a colon on Taken and added something.
To get the gist of this movie, just take "Taken," move it to Moscow from Paris, change Liam Neeson to Julie Benz. There is almost an exact copying of characters from Taken to this bit of cinematic effluent; Peter/Bobby, Sam/and the hairy Russian hacker whose name escapes me, etc. The big difference is that it takes two women to equal one Liam Neeson. For bonus face-palming, the heroine Stevie Parker/50% Bryan Casey even manages to rip off Jason Bourne in "The Bourne Supremacy" when she clandestinely pairs her cell phone with one of the slavers phone in a nightclub.
The only thing to review about this movie, and the only way I managed to get through it without self-mutilating, was watch for things and even lines stolen from "Taken". There's nothing new or original here; it's just insulting. If there were a zero rating, I would give it that. As it is, it gets a one-star bonus for making me laugh (even if it was in derision).
Driven Underground (2015)
Clash of the Incompetents
I alternately burst out laughing and wanted to physically assault my television during this movie. Conveniently stupid victims, incompetent police, and even more incompetent criminals made for absurd situations created by actions no marginally reasonable human being would ever take. If it was just one or two such stupid actions, I could overlook it; but really, this movie just stacks one insulting plot convenience upon another. Incompetent police allow murder suspect to see both eye witnesses inside the police station, but the teen witness's incompetent mother doesn't move to hide her daughter's face from the killer. Oh no--she turns her own face away and leaves her daughter unobstructed so the killer can get a good look at her. Stupid cops leave witness and mother at their own residence after the killer's goons have already threatened them there (with a note made of pasted magazine letters tied to a rock--seriously). Stupid cop guarding house is lured away from the house with a bogus "officer down" call that only Wile E. Coyote would fall for. On and on, the parade of pain never ends. I am forced by my better half to watch these cartoonish movies on Lifetime Movie Network all the time, but this one is probably the worst I've seen in recent memory. It's too bad that Mystery Science Theater 3000 isn't still in production, because this movie was made for it.