.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

Ranking right up their with the audiences yearning for another sequel to the Bad Boys franchise, Jason Statham is back in the very cleverly titled Transporter 2.

Now for those of you who can hardly remember the first film, don't worry. Both it and now its sequel are tailored so that you can waste time inside an air conditioned theatre and forget almost everything you've seen just hours after the lights come back to full illumination.

This time round script writers Robert Kamen and Luc Beeson decided that it would be easier to just copy the premise of last year's Man on Fire and throw our hero Frank Martin (Statham) into the Denzel Washington role. That means there will be a kidnapping of a small child that was under the protection of our hero and there will also be plenty of mindless violence as he searches for the youngin he feels responsible for losing.

Now I happen to like Jason Statham. I liked him in Snatch, The Italian Job and even Cellular. He has a charisma to him. A coolness this side of Steve McQueen. Problem is he keeps picking up scripts that even John Saxon would have turned down.

Transporter 2 has nothing going for it outside of Statham's presence. It's filled with enough bad stunts and even worse cartoonish villains that even the most outlandish of James Bond films would be embarrassed to utilize such farce. Take for instance the scene where Frank must flip his car through the air to hit a suspended wire in hopes of tearing from the autos underbelly a very well hidden car bomb. I watched this scene uneasy in my theatre seat and would not have been surprised if Wyle E. Coyote was shown in the background huffing and puffing as his plan was foiled.

Things do go boom and Jackie Chan would probably be impressed with the fighting contests in particular one clever scene where Frank utilizes a fire hose to engage the baddies. But amongst the few half decent moments there are countless mindless scenes and plotlines that include a virus antidote being stored inside the bad guy (never seen that before!) and a completely implausible ending that takes place inside a private jet.

Transporter 2 may not be the worst movie of the year, but I highly doubt that by the time I get to the end of the calendar for 2005 that this clunker doesn't end up on a few Bottom 10 lists.

Recommendation: Stay away at all costs. It will be on TBS four times a week starting in 2006.