Something that bothered me about Transporter 2

[thewayne]

I liked the movie. It’s just a good simple action flic, nothing wrong with that. Morally, Frank lives in a gray area, he assists people engaged in criminal enterprises, but there are some lines that he won’t cross. OK, not exactly a real hero, but he offs the bad guys, and we’re satisfied.

But one thing bothered me. (spoiler follows)

At the end of the movie, he gets on board the bad guy’s jet through climbing in the front wheel well. The pilot notices that the landing gear isn’t retracting properly and sends the copilot to check it out. There’s Frank, and he breaks the copilot’s neck.

There was NOTHING establishing that the pilot was a bad guy. He wasn’t carrying a gun, there had been no dialog that this was the bad guy’s private jet, making the crew henchmen and thus also guilty and in the “Eligible To Be Snuffed By The Hero” category.

All it would have taken is a little bit of dialog, just 10-15 seconds establishing that these were not just a couple of rent-a-pilots making a chartered Lear run down to South America. Frank could have gone beat-beat-beat and stuffed the guy in a closet, but he was pretty clearly dead from what I saw.

So did Frank kill an innocent man? Looks to me that he did.



This is akin to George Lucas re-timing Han Solo shooting Greedo the Bountyhunter in the cantina in Star Wars 4: A New Hope. With Solo shooting first, he is plainly placed in the category of Rogue who will kill if he has to. By retiming it so that Solo dodges the bolt and then returns fire, killing his erstwhile assassin (I haven’t used the word ‘erstwhile’ in a while), it totally changes Solo’s category from Rogue to Good Guy. And this is what I think the biggest weakness of the first three movies were: no rogues, no morally uncertain character.

The fact that Solo ends up sticking around in movies 5 and 6 has a redemptive quality and adds a lot to the little dialog before the assault in 6 between Solo and Lando where they’re both talking about how stupid and suicidal the forthcoming battle will be, then they find out each of them has decided to stick around. Redemption. But if he’s cast as Good Guy from the beginning, there is no redemptive quality, it’s becomes “All part of the job, Ma’am.”


I won’t even get into Lucas editing Haydn Christenson into the original three movies. I don’t have a problem with Lucas cleaning up certain things to improve the appearance, but he went beyond that. Yet, they are the property of Herr Lucas, and if he wants to play with three classic movies, we can't do anything about it. I’ll just slink off now and fondle my original Star Wars laser discs made before Lucas started fiddling with them.

Yes, an old rant that’s been flogged to death by far better writers than I, still, on occasion you just need to let it out.

Comments

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

You're problem with the pilot was my big problem with most of The Matrix. I can't stand when people are just killed for vaguely, maybe associating with the bad guy.

Also, HAN SHOT FIRST! Mother*#%*ing George %@$*ing Lucas can't just take a steaming %$&@ on something like that and not get yelled at!

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I also don't like wanton slaughter (well, kung fu/samurai films have a lot of that, but the people there are usually armed). There was a Christian Slayter movie a few years back, Very Bad Things. A group of guys go to Vegas for a bachelor party and a hooker is accidently killed. OK, black humor, I can handle that. Then they murder a hotel security guard to cover up the crime. That did it for me. I walked out of the theatre shortly thereafter, it's the only movie I remember leaving on purpose.