Ben Johnson looks at the sequel to the enjoyable 2002 film starring Jason Statham as the hot headed transporter with lightening kung fu.
Transporter 2
Distributor: 20th Century Fox Format: Region 2 - Will only play on European Region 2 or multi-region DVD players. Length: 85 min. Aspect Ratio: Widescreen 2.35:1 Anamorphic Audio: English Subtitles: English, Spanish Extras: Making of featurette; Music: featurette; "The Sentinel: behind the scenes" - inside look; Blooper reel; 12 deleted scenes Sound: Dolby Digital (5.1)
Year of Release: 2005; Origin: United States, France; Studio: Europa Corps.
Director: Louis Leterrier; Producer: Luc Besson, Steve Chasman; Script: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen; Action Director: Corey Yuen Kwai; Cast Jason Statham, Alessandro Gassman, Amber Valletta, Kate Nauta, Matthew Modine, Jason Flemyng.
Alternative Titles: Le Transporteur II (France)
Trailer: Click below to view the trailer for Transporter 2
Plot Synopsis
Statham returns as ex-mercenary Frank Martin, wasting no time with any sort of introduction that could clog up the film: moody, deadly, prone to lapses of sensitivity, nice car. That’s about all you need to know. His transportation services have more recently been utilised by multi-millionaire State official Mr. Billings (Modine) and his vulnerable wife Audrey (Valletta), who has been shuttling their young son from school for the past month despite involuntary lapses of ultra-violence. On one such occasion, Martin accompanies the child to the hospital and is accosted by a scantily clad assassin (Natua) and a duo of heavyweight duds who try to inject the poor child with a deadly, horribly potent virus. Frank leaps into action, dodging bullets that ricochet off wooden doorframes and blowing up half the hospital with a nuclear-style gas explosion. Naturally they neatly survive, but a tracking device leads them directly to the child’s location and he is kidnapped and held for ransom, leaving Martin feeling understandably responsible.
So, now, it’s personal. The culprit behind the abduction is an Italian, Gianni (Gassman), the sort of greasy goon who deserves a slap in the chops. He and his naked cohort and hulking underlings work for big Columbian drug smugglers who decide to infect the young boy with a 24-hour death virus so that his millionaire father will catch it and breath it onto all the official delegates at a prestigious anti-drugs rally. But before you have time to realise how insanely absurd that premise is, Martin’s fists are flying all over the place. Escaping a hiding from the federal police and the official’s top men (the whole ransom sub-plot appears to have left the script entirely by this point), Statham has to work on the sly as he tries to track Gianni down and find the antidote and save not just the child and his parents but also the lives of every delegate in Florida.
A tough job, but given that Martin appears to be capable of landing a car at high-speed in the middle storey of an unfurnished skyscraper, stopping just short of falling over a hundred feet, and chase a bus on a jet-ski only to land it precision-perfect in the invading path of oncoming traffic, then it seems Florida should be in pretty safe hands.
Review
Few could have guessed the rewarding career path of Jason Statham given such small time outings in Guy Ritchie’s best British gangster films to becoming a fully blown, trouser-pressed Hollywood action hero, a lobotomised mix of Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis and Bruce Lee, who’s films appear to have taken on a surreal mindset all of their own. For one, they’ve become less intelligible, even compared to the first greased-up Transporter film, when Luc Besson seemed to have a little more control over the pacing and the characters, letting Corey Yuen Kwai direct the action at a more leisurely, composed rate, creating an altogether more accomplished, if slightly silly, action movie. This film dispenses with Corey’s directing experience altogether, replaces the cosmopolitan feel of France with the gloss of Miami, and takes an absurd leap into the sort of far-fetched hyperactive imaginations of a group of school children tanked on Ribena throwing crayons at each other.
Yep, this is pretty low stuff, folks, but who doesn’t like brainless fluff once in a while, and Statham seems to have set the benchmark in just how brainless this sort of fluff can be. This adolescent wet dream comes with fast cars, twin handheld sub automatic machine guns, lashings of kung fu fighting, and a semi-naked Kate Natua complete with stilettos, bikini, stockings and suspenders, because too much clothing, one assumes, would merely slow her down. One for the lads, then: the sort who drinks cans of Stella while the missus cleans the cooker.
The most mind-boggling scene would be the final fight with Gianni, which occurs after Martin chases a speeding aeroplane in his car, leaping onto the plane’s undercarriage as it takes off. He then proceeds to fight the Italian in mid-air while the plane hurtles to the ground, unaided (the pilot has been killed), only to hit the ocean floor and for them to continue their struggles under water! Clearly in the event of any unforeseen chemical or biological warfare, we don’t need the military, or even those UN peacekeepers: Statham is the only weapon we need in the war on terror. If only he could now learn to talk properly.
Few could have guessed the rewarding career path of Jason Statham given such small time outings in Guy Ritchie’s best British gangster films to becoming a fully blown, trouser-pressed Hollywood action hero, a lobotomised mix of Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis and 
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