Cinema सिनेमा

I watched a movie on TV called The Transporter. It's about an ex-special forces operator, Frank, who now lives in France and works as a transporter making not quite legal deliveries of people/cargo. I'm not going to provide the whole plot here; suffice it to say that Frank gets involved with one of his packages, a young, attractive Chinese girl named Lai, and all hell breaks loose when they attempt to rescue 400 Chinese people smuggled into the country to be used as slave labour.

I must confess I kind of enjoyed it. It was fast-paced and reasonably gripping. No great acting - the characters were true to type. The strong, silent, I-work-better-alone hero; the young, vulnerable-but-gutsy heroine; the handsome villain known only as Wall Street; the I'm-tough-but-I-have-a-heart middle-aged cop. It was good watching if you had something on the stove and had to get up periodically to stir without missing much.

But all through the movie I kept thinking that this was actually a Hindi movie made in English by mistake. I could almost see the writer explaining "Is mein sub kuch hai. Action, romance, comedy, family drama. Fight sequence mein hero ka body dikhaenge, highway mein car aur truck ka chase dikhaenge. Superhit fillum banega!" And seriously that's what it was - an out and out Dhoom 2. I am happy to say that Hrithik and Aishwarya are way better looking and had better chemistry than the lead pair in this movie, but the fact that Lai didn't have that silly giggle was a huge factor in her favour.

So my rating, 2/5. For Dhoom 2, not The Transporter.