My Dumb, Fun Movie of the Night.

For my dumb, fun, movie of the night, I went with Transporter 2 from 2005. I had only seen the first, which was dumb and fun. And this one was dumb and fun. Jason Statham did his alpha manly man thing to the point that I was expecting to see pools of testosterone on the floor around him.

It could easily have been a better film. I could have improved the film massively with an hour and a red pen. But my guess is that the expected viewers for this kind of film don’t want it improved. The fights in the first half were exciting, but as we headed toward the climax, they just became too dumb to mean anything. Our hero against two tough guys and a lingerie-clad girl with automatic pistols? That’s cool. Our hero against twelve axe-wielding brutes with no place to duck? That’s just stupid. He would have died. Simple. It makes it far less exciting. But I’m guessing the fans of these flicks just think it is cooler with more. I’ve seen the same thing with old Shaw brothers martial arts films that get dumber and dumber as they go along until it is nothing but bodies moving on screen. Or anything with Chuck Norris. I don’t think the genre has to be bad, but maybe its biggest fans think it does.

It also had the recent James Bond film problem. Old Bond (Connery/Moore) could get away with certain things because it was part of the dance. It isn’t real. We know it isn’t real. And there are rules in the unreal world. It’s like a musical, where the rules say people can suddenly break into song. So in old Bond, villains could have elaborate ridiculous plans, as well as shark tanks, instead of just shooting Bond and being done with it. But now that Bond is supposed to be “gritty and realistic” that sort of thing doesn’t work so well (like, everything in Spectre). And so we have Transporter 2—not realistic by any means, but also not a faux-world Bond film. In the Transporter world, people do just kill people. All the time. Lots of them. Yet villains could have shot our hero four times—shot him dead—but didn’t. No reason. A lot of reasons why they should. But they didn’t. They instead held off to chat. Which is…dumb. Give me magical Bond spy world, I’m OK with it. But in kill-everything-that-moves Transporter land, our hero should be dead.

All of which means the problem isn’t really with films, it’s with audiences. There are far too many dim film-viewers. Classes would be nice. Thinking would be nicer, but that’s asking too much. So to get better films, we need a better class of audience. Maybe we can get The Transporter to eliminate some of the current group. Just a thought.