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ACTION SPEAKS
LOUDER……
transporter 2
JASON STATHAM RETURNS AS THE ASK-NO-QUESTIONS PROFESSIONAL KNOWN IN THE TRADE AS ‘THE TRANSPORTER’. BUT IN TRANSPORTER 2, SAYS MAX LEVANT, THERE ARE A LOT OF OTHER ISSUES TO DEAL WITH - NOT TO MENTION A COUPLE OF HURRICANES.
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Producer/director Luc Besson is not what most people understand by a French film director. True, his first movie had its share of auteurist trappings: it was a widescreen black-and-white fantasy called The Last Battle. But in Transporter 2, his latest film as a producer, it’s all colour, all action - and there were even a couple of hurricanes to contend with during the film’s Florida shoot.
Of course, beneath the experimental surface of Besson’s debut feature there lurked a sci-fi action movie very like the one that would give him his first international hit: The Fifth Element. Thereafter, both as a director - with films like Subway, Nikita and The Professional - and as a producer (of, among other movies, the French series Taxi and this summer’s martial-arts hit Unleashed, aka Danny the Dog), Besson has shown a knack for combining a very strong personal vision with an equally strong sense of what is going to work at the box office.
As a result, he has become France’s most consistently successful producer/director, and shows no signs of reining in his ambition on other fronts. Recently, for instance, he opened his own studio on the banks of the Seine in Paris. Plus he’s been promoting a series of children’s books he wrote, Arthur and the Minimoys, which is currently being turned into a big-budget movie starring Madonna and Freddie Highmore (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). As if that was not enough, a couple of weeks ago it was revealed that, unbeknownst to anyone else, he had shot a low-budget black-and-white romantic comedy called Angel A over the summer in Paris. Luc Besson, in fact, is living proof that you don’t have to be elitist to be an auteur.
The other area in which the film-maker has proved to have a definite flair is for spotting future stars. For instance, he gave the then 12-year-old Natalie Portman her first role in The Professional. And it was Besson who picked former Olympic diver Jason Statham from among the ranks of increasingly recognisable supporting actors to star in The Transporter, a French-produced, English-language action/thriller which was released theatrically with considerable success in 2002, and went on to be a major hit on DVD.
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