Transporter 2 (2005)

Transporter 2 arrives from 2005, a year when a French-produced action sequel could still be assembled from pure velocity and a well-insured Audi. Jason Statham drives, fights, and delivers his lines as though each syllable costs him money. The plot concerns a kidnapped child, a manufactured virus, and a Colombian cartel, which is to say it concerns almost nothing at all. Louis Leterrier directs with the cheerful amorality of a man handed a stunt budget and no further instructions.

The film's progressive credentials are thin and largely retrospective. Keith David and Shannon Briggs appear in supporting roles, a marshal and a henchman, and the camera never once asks us to consider what their presence signifies. Leterrier later proposed that Frank Martin was the first gay action hero, citing a single line in which our driver declines a drunk woman's advances. The film offers no such reading, and the surrounding installments actively refute it. Women fare no better. We get a neglected wife who drinks too much and a henchwoman in lingerie who shoots indiscriminately. Neither is granted an interior life, and neither appears to want one.

All that remains is a machine for delivering cars through windows. The villains are drug traffickers and a mercenary chemist, so the political content extends to a vague disapproval of narcotics, which is a premise, not a thesis. There is no economic critique, no environmental conscience, no reconsideration of the historical record, and no interest in bodies except as objects to be thrown through glass. It is a lean, unserious, frequently delightful piece of work. That it carries no message is not a defect. It is simply the vintage we have been poured.