The Transporter 2 review

2005.09.06 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

Jason Statham leaps behind the wheel again for a second go at the adolescent fantasy of Frank the Driver in The Transporter 2: Second Gear.... Or at least that's what it should have been called. It's actually just The Transporter 2. The title may be boring, but everything else about the film is over the top.

From the sociopathic lingerie model to the magic armored Audi supercar, the film is a non-stop roller coaster on hallucinogenic drugs.

Statham is fun as Frank Martin, the taciturn Brit with a metaphysical connection with motor vehicles and acrobatic martial arts abilities. Frank is more of a ten-year-old's idea of a cool guy than a sixteen-year-old's, since he never uses any of the guns he picks up, and he doesn't let his drunken hottie of a client even kiss him. Hey, she's married; it wouldn't be right. Plus, she could have cooties.

One chick who definitely does have cooties is Kate Nauta as Lola, the rail-thin exhibitionist, mascara tester, and homicidal maniac who is running the show for her mastermind boyfriend Gianni (Alessandro Gassman). The story goes that Gianni wants to kidnap little Jack Billings (the terrific Hunter Clary), son of an Important Government Official (Matthew Modine at his Matthew Modineiest) and hottie mamma Audrey, played by Amber Valetta, who is like a more beautiful but humorless version of Cameron Diaz.

Things are not as they seem, of course, and the plot is considerably more complicated than your run-of-the-mill kidnapping. This is good, because it masks the fact that Frank allows the heavies execute their plan pretty much flawlessly, despite his incredible stunts. And the heavies reciprocate by allowing Frank to escape to perform more stunts. It's very congenial.

And what stunts they are.

At one crucial point, Frank demands that the gun-wielding heavy let him drive however he wants to escape the cops so that people don't get killed and they don't get caught. His solution? He drives down by the docks while cop cars smash themselves silly in ADD action shots and to the top of a parking garage, where he smashes thru the wall and flies over the street to an unfinished building, where the car takes out a dozen support posts, all without sustaining even a scratch in the paint. How do you cap a scene like that? When's the last time you saw a wino who can't believe his eyes and throws away his bottle?

Seriously, when? A Pepe Le Pew cartoon?

It's as if writer/producer Luc Besson and sophomore director Louis Leterrier watched dozens of old action and comedy movies and made a list of all the bits and cliches so they wouldn't leave any out. Luc Besson is the dauphin of French over-the-top action in the Hong Kong style (being the only practitioner and all). It's clear why Besson demoted Corey Yuen, who directed of The Transporter for him, to martial arts coordinator for the sequel. Yuen wasn't familiar enough with Pepe Le Pew cartoons.

Or Wile E. Coyote.

Seriously, some of the stunts in Transporter 2: The Quickening are right off the Looney Tunes drawing board. The big one is one in which Frank, knowing that there's a bomb under his car, finds a makeshift ramp down by the docks and hits it to do a full 360-degree spin that exposes the underside to a crane hook that knocks the bomb off. That's the level we're playing on here, folks.

Still, the movie has tongue-in-cheek fun with this sort of ridiculousness at a pretty blistering pace. Fragile, bony, half-naked Lola, for example, is a comic book vision of femme fatale lethality. I wish the movie had managed to have fun just making Jason Statham look cool, tho, as he did kicking down that door in the first movie.

Instead, it piles absurdity on top of absurdity, making Statham a stoic superman whose acrobatic control of his body is the stuff ancient mythology is made of. He jumps out a window and catches two glass vials in mid-air before crashing onto a moving taxi. He pilots a jet ski up a ramp, onto the street, and leaps from it to a moving school bus. He dodges bullets.

And... he beats up many, many people with his fists. I think at one point he lays out ten men with the jawbone of an ass. Or maybe it was a firehose. He was moving pretty fast.

The inevitable comparisons to Jackie Chan don't hold water here. Chan took pride in actually doing his stunts, whereas Leterrier is content to manufacture Statham's stunts in the editing room.

But if what you're looking for is mindless fun with some silly thrills, and you aren't a stickler for physics, The Transporter 2: Keep on Transportin' might not seem like a wasted afternoon.

f e e d b a c k

Respond to this page by your e-mail client. Please be sure to mention the title of the article.

s i d e b a r