The first sequel in the Transporter franchise obeys all of the rules of sequels – bigger budget, bigger death count, more gloss, and at least one more lingerie-clad hottie with two handheld machine guns. It’s otherwise exactly the same movie as the original, with a few negligible plot modifications. What isn’t changed is the ready-made action movie premise, this time using such an old action cliché that the first thing I thought of was those little sponge-things I used to make my mom buy me when I was a kid. You put a drop of water on it and in a couple minutes it turns into a dinosaur or something.

But beyond the just-add-water premise, it at least ultimately proves to be another example of the uniquely entertaining over-the-top action extravaganza that the series has come to be known for. The movie works because it knows not to take itself seriously, and while this also prohibits anyone in the audience from being in danger of taking anything seriously, it doesn’t stop it from being fun.

There is a scene in the movie, for example, where Frank notices a bomb strapped to the underside of his car, and when I saw the way he managed to dislodge it I laughed out loud, and not necessarily in a bad way. You will laugh too, but there is a distinct feeling that you’re laughing with the movie and not at it, and that’s why it works.

Frank Martin has been doing some chauffeuring duties for the wealthy Billings family – Jefferson, who works in drug control for the government, and his estranged wife Audrey – and ends up making an unlikely friendship with their 6-year-old son Jack.

Only Frank Martin would get attacked by a group of people like this in an empty parking garage...

But don’t worry, the unlikeliness of that friendship soon begins to look very normal when compared to the rest of the plot developments. Jack is kidnapped by a stereotypical Colombian villain and his henchmen, which include his statuesque blonde girlfriend (who spends the entire movie wearing nothing but skimpy lingerie and a ton of eyeshadow) and a bunch of meathead henchmen.

So get this, the villain, like me, is Colombian, so of course he’s hell-bent on flooding the world with drugs, but wait until you hear his plan! His scheme is to infect Jack with a deadly airborne virus that will in turn infect anyone who comes into contact with him. But it turns out that they don’t even want a ransom, they hand the kid back with amazingly little resistance (in one of the movie’s dumbest scenes). The kid is left in a paddywagon, where the police fear there might be a bomb. The mother, worried that the boy will suffocate, throws caution to the wind and rushes in to rescue him herself.

I didn’t know you could suffocate in the back of the truck, but no matter. This is, believe it or not, not the stupidest thing that the mother says in the movie.

Once again, Frank proves remarkably adept at tying his opponents up with their own clothes and, you know, handy firehoses and such...

When explaining the boy’s plight a little while later, Frank explains to her, “Jack’s been infected with a deadly virus, Audrey. Now anyone who comes into contact with him will die.” Audrey: “What are you telling me? Are you telling me my son’s gonna die?”

Ok, maybe I’m nitpicking, but really it all adds to the amusement of the whole movie. I love these What are you saying?? moments.

So anyway, we learn that anyone that Jack breathes on will be infected with this deadly virus, and his father Jefferson is soon attending a conference with lots of high-level officials involved in the United States drug control infrastructure. You see where this is going?

I hope so, because while the plot is actually a little more complex than you would expect from a movie like this, it doesn’t slow down for very long to give you time to think about anything, which I suppose is just as well. It moves frantically from one action set piece to the next, balancing out the preposterous action sequences with greater emotional involvement than the original movie in the relationship between Jack and Frank.

The kind of girl you bring home to mom.

But when it comes down to it, The Transporter 2 is exactly the same thing as the original movie. It has all the same ingredients but in slightly different quantities, so your opinion of the first movie is going to give you a much better idea of how you’ll like the second one than any review is going to. Then again, something tells me that a good portion of the Transporter target audience aren’t big readers, so maybe I’m wasting my time here anyway?

Nah, I’m just kidding. That’ll be my bad joke for the day. But regardless of the reading habits of the Transporter fan club, I don’t need to explain to you that this is not meant to be an intelligent action movie. It’s a super-fast action thriller with stunts that would make James Bond blush and a lot of people shooting each other up, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t entertaining…

3.5 Beans out of 5.

I have an undying love of time travel movies, I think it’s one of the single most interesting premises ever applied to motion pictures, so I have an unusually high tolerance for ridiculousness in time travel movies. I was pretty thoroughly interested in A Sound of Thunder for about the first half an hour or so until I realized that it has absolutely no understanding of how time travel paradoxes work.

The movie takes place in the year 2055, and a woman named Sonia Rand has developed a time machine that can take hunters back to the time of the dinosaurs where, for an enormous price, they can hunt real dinosaurs. They open a business called Time Safari, which just seems to be to be thickly shrouded in bad ideas, and all manner of super-rich hunters show up to try out the futuristic and highly imperfect technology.

Of course, no one has ever travelled through time, so all we know about what would happen if you travelled to the distant past and changed something is necessarily theoretical, but the minor application of simple logic suggests that if you travel to the Cretaceous period and start killing off Tyrannosaurs, you’re going to cause all manner of unknown changes for the next several million years with an unknown effect on modern times.

I don’t put a lot of stock into chaos theory – the idea that a mosquito flapping its wing in southeast Asia will set in motion a chain reaction of events that will culminate in a hurricane battering the American south, but I do remember seeing a Simpsons episode where Homer was travelling back and forth to the time of the dinosaurs and making little mistakes which resulted in huge changes when he got back to Springfield, and that whole idea just seems prety sensible to me.

Not in this movie. Here, all the changes take place gradually, in “time waves,” which are basically just astonishingly bad CGI tidal waves, as though Father Time is only gradually beginning to realize that someone has tricked him and sends out memos that radiate out from the center of, ah, time, I guess.

You see, each wave changes different things, animals, plants, weather, etc, leaving everything else temporarily unaffected. And of course, the humans will be changed by the last wave, so that they can watch all of the other changes taking place while they wonder what will happen to them. Luckily, one of the characters in the movie is an expert who somehow knows how all of this stuff works, so we get a tour guide of the freaky events taking place. Nice.

There is one scene where a time wave bowls through the world, reducing an entire city to a post-apocalyptic world, a cheap version of the New York City from I Am Legend. After the first wave passes through, the two main characters are standing near an overturned vehicle, where a crowd of people have gathered and are all crowded around the vehicle, evidently more interested in the fact that it’s on its side than that their entire city has instantly reached an advanced state of decay. Mayeb these were the same underpaid and under-directed extras that crowded around the head of the Statue of Liberty in Cloverfield like it was the office water cooler.

Things start to get complicated when Travis Ryer (an uninspired performance by Edward Burns) tries to go back and stop the first crew from making the first change, but this time, instead of the computer missing the landing site by five minutes like in a previous mission, she misses by tens of millions of years, sending Ryer into the old west, right in front of another time wave. Something tells me this technology just wasn’t quite ready for public comsumption yet.

And how do they manage to keep going back to the same point in time? Well you see, the computer, Tammie, I think they called her, is programmed to send them there. The physics and calculations involved in doing that are not explained, but obviously to attempt such an explanation would be confusing and meaningless, and the movie is not smart enough to attempt such a thing anyway.

It was about 35 minutes into the film that I knew it was going to be pretty disastrously bad, that there was going to be no redeeming turnaround where it would get better in the second half. Of course, movies like this almost never do that. The reason to keep watching is to see what kind of things they come up with, even if they are badly animated. Most of all, I wanted to see what changes would happen to the humans.

We never do, of course. That would be too complicated for cartoonish special effects like this. All we see are some bizarre gorilla dinosaurs, and luckily Ryers happens to know their “only weakness.”

Time travel is endlessly fascinating to me, but sadly, this one goes down as a boring failure.

The Bean Meter

1.5 Beans out of 5.