The Transporter

[liralen]

I finally got to see pieces and chunks of this movie and enjoyed it. Hee. It's very much an American movie trying to take on the Hong Kong style and losing badly in the comparison, especially with the liability clauses in everyone's contacts. There's a few fights that looked like they were trying for the Jackie Chan fights in limited spaces with unlimited props idea, but they went WAY too slow and only a single strike per shot was just a little sad. But I loved the grease sequence where he pops off the strap-on bike pedals with their spikes and slams into 'em and I'm like Oooooooo... yes. That kind of cleverness.

Shallow, quick, fast, and flashy and very American it's still fun.

Comments

[blacksnail.livejournal.com]

You should absolutely positively see Transporter 2. They finally got the pacing right.

[niherlas.livejournal.com]

And here I was going to say, "Do not, under any circumstances, see T2".

Rented it. Hated it. Too busy. Too little good fight. Too much obvious CG. Too much... Hollywood.

[blacksnail.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I can see that.

Li, to elaborate on what I'm talking about, there's this thing they do in the 2nd movie. They say, "we're going to show you something patently ridiculous 10 minutes into the movie. We acknowledge this is patently ridiculous and does not work according to, you know, physics, but it's REALLY COOL. We're showing you this because we're going to keep doing this for the rest of the movie, and if the first one doesn't bug you then sit back and enjoy the ride."

What they managed to make was the Spycraft RPG movie. I don't know how well it would translate to the small screen, honestly, as it was an unapologetic summer movie. It is by no means a Jackie Chan movie, but with Transporter 2 you could tell they were actually having fun making the film (as opposed to the first, which seemed as though the actors were haunted with the words "contractually obligated" in a few places).

[niherlas.livejournal.com]

I'd like to add that I both saw - and enjoyed - the first movie.

To be honest, I had hope in much of the setup for T2. The opening fight scene with the would-be carjackers. Establishing his relationship with the boy and family. The sparring that established our bad guy. I even had some hopes for our bad girl.

But it devolved, quickly, into Hollywood. You could see the hands of a re-write committee all over this, as they quickly busted out of the willing-suspension-of-disbelief envelope that they'd established in the first movie.

Just glad it was a NetFlix rental...

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Ah, cool then. We have these RedBox rentals out of the local McDonald's, just $1 a movie for a whole 24 hours. :-) So it would be a cheap thrill and worth just that much.

Cool to know!! Thank you both for the reviews. I needed that.