You Know, for the Kids

The first The Transporter was a welcome surprise. Those of us that were into independent movies (like me, working at Blockbuster) had already heard of Jason Statham before his 2002 actioner, but even those of us that had seen Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch wouldn’t have been able to predict Statham’s move into pure action hero territory. And yet it fit. It worked perfectly. He had a quiet cool about him that the movie emphasized, and it brought him together with some pretty solid action for a fun, Euro-trash adventure. It was aces.

The film was a solid enough performer for EuropaCorp to sign off on a sequel. Statham signed on, director Louis Letterier came back, Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen wrote another script. All the pieces were there for a sequel promising all the big action, fun hijinx, and Statham’s cool-guy performance to fill another movie. And yet… it doesn’t quite work. The film was a success, bringing in over twice the haul of the first movie ($89.1 Mil against a $32 Mil budget), because audiences absolutely wanted more of the Transporter. But the magic of the first film didn’t translate as well to a sequel. The spark was missing.

In this second film, Frank Martin (Statham) is handling transporting around a kid for a month, acting as the driver for Jack Billings (Hunter Clary) as a favor to one of his colleagues (who’s laid up for a month). Frank is good with Jack, which the kid’s mother, Audrey (Amber Valletta), notices. He’s more of a father figure for the kid, in the short time he’s been there, than Jack’s actual absent father, Senator Jefferson Billings (Matthew Modine). But Frank is just there for a month and then he’ll be gone, back to his normal life.

Except there’s a wrinkle (because of course there is). The Senator is part of a drug enforcement task force and the Colombian cartels want the whole international group shut down. They pay high-end criminal Gianni Chellini (Alessandro Gassmann) to take out the Senator, and the whole task force, and to make a statement with it. So Chellini puts his goons on it, and they grab a biologist to develop a virus. The plan is to infect Jack, who would then infect the Senator, and the Senator would then infect everyone at the international meeting, and the whole task force would dissolve (maybe literally). And the only person seemingly on the case that can handle the job of finding Jack and saving everyone… is Frank.

Credit where it’s due, it’s good to see that this film doesn’t feel the need to redo the same beats of the first movie all over again. It’s a new story, a new setting (Miami instead of Monaco), a new reason for Frank to get involved. The film could easily have said, “hey, he’s double-crossed on another mission and has to once again kick ass and take names for a bit of revenge,” but we don’t get that. The personal connection between him and Jack is an efficient way to get him involved, and that does work.

The issue, I think, with The Transporter 2 is that the movie doesn’t keep the events at a level that Frank is really meant to handle. Frank is a street-level criminal (quite literally as he runs his business on the street, driving around). Taking on a gang of international terrorists is way above his pay-grade. This isn’t an adventure that really fits into the bounds of his rules or his code. Frank feels tossed into this adventure, awkwardly doing things to the chagrin of the criminals, instead of this having been built up as a Frank adventure. It’s weird and awkward.

Frankly, there’s a vibe of “let’s do a Die HardThe 1980s were famous for the bombastic action films released during the decade. Featuring big burly men fighting other big burly men, often with more guns, bombs, and explosions than appear in Michael Bay's wildest dreams, the action films of the decade were heavy on spectacle, short on realism. And then came a little film called Die Hard that flipped the entire action genre on its head.” to the movie. One guy stuck on a mission, taking out terrorists at one set-piece after another is the plot of basically all of the later Die Hard films, and it would be just as easy to see John McClaine in this film as Frank. Hell, maybe it would be easier since, over time, McClaine built up a weird ability to be good at killing terrorists. Frank was never that kind of guy, and slotting him into a film that’s basically “like Die Hard but on the streets of Miami” doesn’t quite work.

It doesn’t help that the direction this time around feels lazy and uninspired. The cinematography feels like it’s riffing on Miami Vice and The Fast and the Furious, all bright lights and cool cars. Most of the big action set pieces have an air of artificiality to them, with CGI used more often than it should be. Even the sequences that are just Statham kicking ass and taking names lack the visceral punch of the first film. Statham is clearly still game, and he puts his charisma and energy into the sequences, but there’s too much chopping, too much editing, not enough substance to the action sequences.

But I think the film also fails to understand how to get you invested in the film. The first movie got you into Frank immediately and even as more and more twists were piled on him, the focus was on Frank being cool, following his rules. The sequel tries to shorthand all that, giving him a briefer action sequence to kick off the film that doesn’t feel as slick when it comes to establishing who he is. And then the film gives him a kid so that we feel like he has to save the kid. The child isn’t really a character, he’s just a motivator because, “Frank has to save the cute kid, right?” Nothing we know about Frank makes us think he’d really care, but for some reason he does, and that’s that. That’s all the character development we really get.

It all comes back to Frank being an awkward fit for this film. A different character would be the kind to get invested in a family, to play jokes and riddles with a kid as he’s driving him around, to go on the hunt looking for the kid and every terrorist involved in this whole fiasco, but that’s just not Frank. The film recasts its core character forgetting everything that we liked about him for a far more generic and less interesting action film. Frank can do a lot, but it’s pretty clear that he cannot be the central character of a Die Hard film.

With that said, I think Statham could be a great replacement for John McClaine’s original actor, Bruce Willis. Considering he’s the best part of this sequel, and that even when this film doesn’t work Statham does all he could to carry it, there’s some merit in seeing Statham have a long and successful action career (it’s been long, but successful is another matter). The material here fails Statham but Statham doesn’t let us down at all.