The Transporter Refueled (2015)

There is a moment in The Transporter Refueled when we are asked to accept that a retired MI6 agent has been poisoned as leverage, only for the poison to be revealed as a ruse, which is roughly the level of narrative cunning on display across the entire enterprise. The film arrives as a reboot of a franchise that was never especially in need of one, recasting its laconic driver with a younger model and relocating the action to the French Riviera, where the sun is bright and the moral complexity is not. It is a machine built to deliver car chases, and it delivers them with the joyless efficiency of a courier who has somewhere else to be.

The plot concerns a quartet of former sex slaves who have spent fifteen years assembling a revenge operation against the Russian trafficker who wronged them. This is, by the standards of the genre, a fairly muscular allocation of agency to its female characters, who drive the scheme, execute the heists, and dispatch the villain themselves while our nominal protagonist functions as a well-dressed chauffeur. We should not overstate the achievement. The film is interested in vengeance, not in the conditions that produced the victims, and the criminal syndicate is dismantled through bank transfers and fingerprint theft, which registers as anti-establishment only in the vaguest, genre-mandated way. The international cast lends a cosmopolitan sheen that the script never bothers to examine.

What we have, then, is a brisk and forgettable thriller that gestures toward female empowerment without saying anything about it, and toward globalism without noticing it. There are no speeches, no causes, no lectures. The film's ambitions extend no further than the next corner it can drift around, and on that modest terms it succeeds. It is the cinematic equivalent of a hotel lobby: clean, international, and entirely without a point of view.