French director Pierre Morel oversaw the making of the first Taken film, the action thriller wherein former CIA-agent Liam Neeson pursues bad guys who kidnap his teenage daughter, and later abduct both the hero and his wife in subsequent sequels. So clearly someone thought there was no one better than Morel to direct what is effectively a remake of Taken, this time a story in which a female spy with a very particular set of skills must rescue her kidnapped husband, who knows nothing of her espionage career. The result is blandly generic with the gender flip not bringing much to the table apart from some cheerable lines where the heroine upbraids her opponents for using the slur “bitch” in the workplace.
That said, Morel once again does well with the complex action sequences, especially the car chases across a European city (an unnamed locale in Croatia, using locations in Zagreb and Ljubljana). At least the casting is pleasing, with the athletic and strong-jawed Kate Beckinsale starring as lead spy lady Avery Graves, adopting an American accent for most of the time apart from some comic moments when, in disguise, the British-born actor pretends to be British. Stunt doubles probably did the heavy lifting in the blurrily edited hand-to-hand combat scenes and sequences where Graves flies through the air holding on to a massive drone, but you can see it’s clearly Beckinsale running around in the medium shots and closeups.
