Transporter 2

Stuart:

Utter shite.

It’s astounding that the writer/director team behind The Transporter and Unleashed have dared fill our cinema screens with this piece of crap. Honestly.

Transporter 2Let me be succinct: The plot is pathetic. The acting is poor. The special effects are deplorable. The action may be okay, but it’s impossible to see what’s going on most of the time. How on earth can Luc Besson and Louis Leterrier have been responsible for this feeble (and frankly unnecessary) sequel? I have a sneaky suspicion that Transporter 2 was made on the weekends in between shooting Unleashed.

The script does not do the cast justice. Jason Statham does okay in a mindless kind of way, and for some reason seems to have brought his Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels comrade Jason Flemyng along for the ride. Mathew Modine, who was unfortunate enough to star in the vastly underrated and unsuccessful Cutthroat Island, is dull, and the female cast members are only there to a: get naked, b: offer themselves for sex or c: cry. François Berléand’s character is carried over from the first film and has somehow now become an American interpretation of a bumbling Frenchman. What;s even more annoying is that Keith David (The Chronicles of Riddick ) is here, albeit briefly. What on earth is an actor of his calibre doing in this?

After the brief ray of sunshine that was Unleashed, action movie cinematography has gone back to smoke and mirrors (or more accurately cheat and hide), with so many random high-speed cuts that you only get the faintest idea of what is going on.

The Transporter was by no means a brilliant piece of cinema. But it featured some kick-arse action and was a pleasant (if mind-numbing) timewaster. Transporter 2 simply infuriates through ineptitude.

I haven’t hated a film this much for a very long time. Transporter 2 brought out the Mark in me.

Rating: 0.5 stars
Review by Stuart Wilson, 4th October 2005
Hoopla Factor: 1.0 stars


The Proposition Howl's Moving Castle