Luc Besson is back to once again make me question my faith in the only Frenchman I trust to entertain me… well, besides Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Jean Reno and Andre the Giant of course. Yes, Mr. Besson returns to write and produce this sequel to The Transporter that once again finds Jason Statham up to his receded hairline in explosions, bullet casings and ridiculous circumstances that make me furl my brow and pick my jaw up from the floor… damn thing just doesn’t wanna stay put anymore. Guess I need to use a bigger gauge of bolt.
In this sequel, superman transporter and bender of reality Frank Martin (the only thing worse than an action hero having two first names is having one or more names that are verbs and/or adjectives) has gone legit and taken a chauffer job for a prominent political figure in Miami. Instead of running drugs or driving bank robbers around, big tough Mr. Martin now spends his days carting Mr. Billings’ snot nosed little kid back and forth from school while fighting off the occasional posse of would-be carjackers. If you saw the first movie, you can imagine why I use the term “would be”. Anyway, when a cell of South American terrorists are hired to take out a congress big-wig lawmaker types, they plan to do so by poisoning Billings’ kid with a designer virus created by Russian scientists. The virus is airborne; so it’ll be passed from son to father to everyone at the convention when Billings speaks to them. Will a simple “chauffer” be able to save everyone, no matter how many times his shirt manages to be torn off or how many computer generated bullets he may be able to dodge?! More importantly, will he bang the hot and neglected Mrs. Billings while he’s at it?
As I said in my Shorty for the first movie, Jason Statham can do no wrong in a role as a tough-as-timber testosterone factory, so I’m going to leave my comments about Captain Action at that. He was rough, charming and beats the living shit out of everyone around him, end of story. Speaking of story though, the story is a little more creative than The Transporter’s generic “slave trade and human smuggling” tale, so that wins this sequel a few bonus points. However, those bonus points don’t bring this puppy up to a passing grade when the creative staff is answering wrong on 60% of the remainder of the test. Not only are the bullets generated ala computers this time around, but some of the movie’s big stunts abuse us by throwing computer generated cars in our faces as well! I know people are trying to cut down on movie making costs these days by not destroying cars and not hiring capable stunt drivers to do these dangerous scenes for real, but when cgi has to be used for anything other than broccoli-headed Martians or a steel cage match gangbang between a handful of Velociraptors and a T-Rex, my balls are available for sucking.
In the last movie, Frank had an adorable little Taiwanese poon named Lai thrown at him as his love interest. In keeping with the “real men fuck ‘em and leave ‘em” mentality I suppose, Frank comes into Transporter 2 sans snatch. This leaving the gate open for some fresh baked poontang pie to find it’s way off the window sill, Frank’s junk falls into the sights of his boss’s milf wife Audrey (Amber Valletta) and his cinematic sparring partner the gun-toting junkie whore Lola (Kate Nauta). I would’ve gone for Audrey myself, as Lola is heroin thin and generally looks like a $5 piece of ass you’d dredge out of the gutter at 4am on a Sunday morning. Something about skinny women frightens me and it’s probably their uncanny resemblance to teenage boys that does it. Give me the horny soccer mom desperate for phallic attention any day, thank you. Meanwhile, the movie’s other/lead villain Gianni is nothing more than a crooked-tooth Colombian drug cartel stereotype, so I can understand why his lingerie wearing hit-whore Lola gets more screen time. As for the rest of the cast, I definitely could’ve used more Keith David and Jason Flemyng in my movie diet, but I’m happy that they at least showed up.
As far as the musical accompaniment goes, The Transporter was all about generic hip-hop that was hit for most of the action scenes and miss (as in, “I wouldn’t miss my hearing if I shoved a pencil in my ears right now”) for the rest of the movie. Transporter 2 takes a different approach and pummels us instead with background music from a dime store Terminator knock-off. I can’t really say which I like more, nor can I say which annoys me more. Instead I’ll just say I’m as indifferent to one as I am the other and let it go.
The fight scenes were fun. At least that’s one part where the “everything in the sequel gets doubled” mentality works well in this movie. Bigger thugs to beat up, more guys with axes and swords, more guns to fire, just plain more of the good stuff! But now, back to more of the stuff that doesn’t work. The reality altering moments that were such a contention with me from the first movie are back, not so much in abundance but ramped up to the proverbial “11”. Though the scene with Jason Statham chasing a bus traveling bad guy via jet ski along the coast will have “Simpsons” fanatics crying out “Just like in ‘Knight Boat’!”, the bigger offender would have to be the scene in which Frank has to drive his car off of an improvised ramp, conveniently placed in front of a stationary crane’s hanging hook, which he uses to yank an explosive device from the bottom of his car just moments before it explodes… and then adds a few extra head slaps to the equation by landing the car… WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO ME BESSON?! I’VE ALWAYS BEEN LOYAL DAMN IT!
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there won’t be a Transporter 3, or if there is that the creative crew will try tightening the reins a little on the whole “lets dick slap Isaac Newton in the face… repeatedly!” principle. I’m not a stickler for “realistic” action movies, but the more of these I see, the lower and lower my supply of salt grains becomes. Eventually I’m just going to run out of them and I’ll just wind up snapping and killing everyone in Hollywood. The director for both flicks, Louis Leterrier (whose last name, roughly translated by my opinion, means “the terror”…), is currently wrapped up directing the sequel to Ang Lee’s comic masterpiece (everyone else can go fuck themselves on this) The Hulk. Though I don’t wish any ill upon the movie itself and I actually think Louis Louis’s experience with the absurdity of these two movies may translate well into a movie whose roots are based entirely in the top soil of science-fiction, I’m hoping the experience will turn Mr. Terror off from moviemaking as a whole and he won’t be stepping anywhere near any clapboards with “Transporter III” scrawled across them ever. As for me, the pizza delivery guy just crashed his car through my front window and I’ve got an exploding thin crust with everything on it to disarm before it takes out three city blocks, so forgive me for the ol’ “cut and run”.
