Taken 2 Trailer Release: Watch Liam Neeson Return As Ex-CIA Agent Mills in BlockBuster Sequel [VIDEO]
"Taken 2," starring Liam Neeson in theaters on Friday, is being met with a mix of jeers and cheers from critics. Courtesy

Liam Neeson fans, rejoice. Neeson, who played ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills in the 2008 thriller Taken, will reprise his role as the ass-kicking, middle-aged retired spy in a sequel to come out later this year, Taken 2.

The sequel ought to please fans. The original film averaged a 7.9 rating on IMDB and a 58 percent freshness rating on film critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, but more important, Taken 2 features all of the same actors (Neeson, Maggie Grace and Famke Janssen reprise their roles as the Mills family) and most of the same crew behind the cameras, including screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, as well as the film's director, Olivier Megaton.

In the first film, Mills' daughter Kim, played by Maggie Grace (Twilight: Breaking Dawn), takes a trip to Paris and is almost immediately kidnapped by terrorists. Before she is abducted, she gets on the phone with her father, who tells her the horrible truth: You will be taken. He then gets on the phone with one of the terrorists, and delivers one of the most memorable monologues in recent memory:

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money, Mills said. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

The other end of the line is silent, until one man speaks. Good luck, he says.

In the sequel, Mills and his wife are vacationing in Istanbul when his wife is abducted by a man connected to one of the terrorists killed in the original film.

He slaughtered our men, our brothers, our sons. We're going to find him, says a mysterious man at a funeral. We will have our revenge.

We then see the Mills couple (Neeson and Janssen) in Istanbul, when suddenly Kim appears out of nowhere to surprise her father. After the reunited family spends some time enjoying the sights in Turkey, shady and shifty men are given the orders to take all three of them... alive. Then, we hear the reprisal and remixing of one of the most famous movie quotes:

Listen to me carefully, Kim. Your mother is going to be taken. People are going to come for you too.

What are you going to do? Kim asks.

What I do best, Mills says. We then see a montage of Mills beating the living daylights out of terrorist scum.

According to IMDB, the film's release date is Oct. 5, 2012.

Check out the trailer below, and let us know your impressions in the comments section below.