Cheap Thrills & Primordial Stupidity
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Watching “The Transporter 2” is a lot like ordering one of those onion loaves at a restaurant: At first it looks like a delicious junk-food treat, but you’re not three bites in before you think, “Uh oh, I may have miscalculated how much of this garbage I can stomach.”
Jason Statham reprises his role as Frank Martin, the martial-arts chauffeur from “The Transporter,” but the movie is a pale imitation of its predecessor. Amber Valletta and Matthew Modine have given birth to a baby that doesn’t look like either of them, and when the kid is kidnapped by European terrorists, it’s up to Frank to attack everyone in Miami until he rescues the brat. With his dedication to service and his supernatural efficiency, Frank comes across like P.G. Wodehouse’s inimitable manservant, Jeeves, if Bertie Wooster’s super-butler had dispensed roundhouse kicks and elbow locks instead of wise advice and witty bon mots.
“The Transporter 2” commits many sins – lingering close-ups of Ms. Valletta’s sun-damaged skin, a leading man with the emotionality of a stick – but the worst is hiring Hong Kong action genius Corey Yuen and giving him nothing to do. Mr. Yuen’s inspired action direction is buried beneath a fatty layer of jittery, amateur camerawork, and in the climactic fight scene Mr. Statham and the villain, Alessandro Gassman, roll around on the floor like lovers, not fighters.
There is a single, two-minute scene, however, where Mr. Statham takes out some opponents with a fire hose that contains more lunatic genius and ridiculous poetry than any other action movie this year. It’s the moment when the movie delivers on its promise to go entertainingly over-the-top and let the cheap thrills fly. But it’s literally just that: a moment.
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In “A Sound of Thunder,” time travel exists, but it’s little more than a rich man’s toy. Charles Hatton (Sir Ben Kingsley) offers temporal safaris where jaded fat cats can go back in time on expeditions led by Dr. Ryer (Edward Burns) and shoot dinosaurs.
When one of them accidentally kills a butterfly, violating the company’s strict “Don’t change the past” policy, the reverberations ripple through time, causing the present to experience waves of reverse evolution (I don’t get it, either). Finally, Dr. Ryer and a tart-tongued scientist, Dr. Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack), put things right.
The movie itself experiences a sort of devolution, starting with all the sophistication of a bad sci-fi flick, then becoming dumber than a direct-to-video thriller, dumber than a comic book, dumber than a video game, and finally reaching a level of primordial stupidity. If last year’s “Primer” was a time-traveling movie for the smartypants set, “Thunder” is a time traveling movie for boneheads.
Not surprisingly, it was directed by Peter Hyams, who has experienced a backward evolution of his own: He started his career directing clever B-grade sci-fi like “Outland” and “Capricorn One.” He’s ending it directing Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles and “A Sound of Thunder.”
I hope Sir Ben Kingsley was offered an enormous check to participate in this clunker; if so, he earned every cent of it. But everything else is so cheap and crummy that it’s immediately apparent why this flick has sat on the shelf since 2002.
The movie does get a little mileage out of some carnivorous dinosaur monkeys, but if I could travel through time to kill the primates who evolved into the producers of this time-waster, I would happily do it, just to have my 103 minutes back.