With every passing year, it becomes more and more obvious that Hollywood needs a new one-man army. The heavyweights of the 80s and 90s have fizzled to some degree. Willis' straightforward action flicks after \Die Hard With a Vengeance"" are practically interchangeable, Stallone has only found time to mumble through some direct-to-video potboilers and reality TV and Schwarzenegger has his hands full governing California.
Vin Diesel's career is in a paradoxical state-a lucrative downward spiral from Rob Cohen's campy MTV-fueled ""Fast and the Furious"" and ""XXX"" to shameless ""Kindergarten Cop"" territory with ""The Pacifier""-and The Rock has truly walked the authentic action-hero walk in only one movie to date (""The Rundown"").
Based on his unmistakable screen presence in the past and presently in ""Transporter 2,"" the fun but exceedingly daft follow-up to 2002's loopily entertaining actioner, the charmingly stoic Jason Statham personifies the contemporary, sleek, professional action hero better than anyone else today.
Make no mistake about it, ""Transporter 2"" is an unapologetically stupid movie that nonetheless knows its target audience and delivers the far-fetched goods without sullying too much goodwill-at least until the very end. Statham's Frank Martin, a professional courier, now works in Miami chauffering around a wealthy drug czar's kid (a sniveling Matthew Modine). Mostly all's well with the Transporter, who seems to have become comfortable with his life playing riddling mentor to the 6-year-old and making eyes at the adoring kid's hottie mom, Audrey (Amber Valletta, Kevin James' object of affection in ""Hitch""), until the usual horde of insidious villains rush in with a typically convoluted kidnapping scheme.
Led by a snide, overconfident heavy (Alessandro Gussman) and his lingerie-and-stiletto-wearing, Uzi-toting henchwoman Lola (stick-figure model Kate Nauta), the kidnappers get the kid in their possession, but, for the rest of the film, must contend with the Transporter. As its every subsequent action scene exists to top the one before it, ""Transporter 2"" continually ups the ante with a series of ridiculous set-pieces which are, for the most part, thrilling and laughably daffy enough to entertain. Until the finale, that is.
In its final fifteen or so minutes, ""Transporter 2"" spectacularly shoots itself in the foot with an action scene aboard a careening airplane so outlandish it may as well have thrown in the aliens from ""War of the Worlds"" for the hell of it. It's as if director Louis Letterier and co-writer Luc Besson suddenly ran out of money but decided to try and squeeze in the showstopper to end all showstoppers anyway. Complete with CGI shots less technologically advanced than some of ""Tron's"" special effects and some seriously ham-fisted editing, ""Transporter 2's"" ending is so thunderously pathetic and so far removed from any realm of reality or competent action filmmaking that it ultimately sours the film as a whole.
But for a solid seventy minutes, Leterrier capably guides ""Transporter 2"" over nagging rough patches of bland and distracting attempts at intentional humor. After May's sublimely brutal ""Unleashed,"" the still-novice filmmaker proves beyond a reasonable doubt that if it's no-frills, righteous ass-kicking you need, he's your guy. His workmanlike approach makes ""Transporter 2"" feel like a rousing, disposable spinoff-a ""Transporter: Miami"" if you will-but in a positive, unintrusive way. Letterier almost made the film that ""XXX: State of the Union"" wanted to be-an unpretentious, amplified follow-up designed to provide some guilty-pleasure fun in the same vein of its macho predecessor.
Even though the movie blunders, Statham's steely charisma never wavers; while ""Transporter 2"" never strains to be remotely credible, the rising British star is always believable as a one-man-army. The ""Transporter"" series will probably not catapult Statham into bona fide stardom, but it is a fairly diverting warm-up for the right project that should presumably do it. Film desperately needs a new resident badass in action movies, and Statham could very likely be the man's man to fill that void.
