Creating a film franchise is an interesting business. Writing about the Spider-Man films recently made me think more about the ways that sequels function almost as a genre spawned by the original movie, calling back to it so that people who enjoyed the first can get more of the same kind of fun from the second and subsequent parts in a series.

Take James Bond for instance: where would Jim be without a villain with a foreign name and a distinctive physiological quirk such as weeping blood or a tertiary nipple? In Indiana Jones films viewers would be disappointed if the whip didn’t turn up somewhere along the line. Nightmare on Elm Street sequels had better involve a sinister janitor upsetting the lives of a bunch of hormone-fuelled teens. And so on.

Which brings us to Transporter 2. As is often the case, it begins with a sequence which establishes some of the ground rules for how the Transporter world works. Some lowlifes try to take Jason Statham’s car — a lovingly filmed Audi — only to discover that the driver is a badass with considerable fighting prowess. Next we come to the twist element, by which we distinguish one chapter of a franchise from another — Jurassic Park 2’s new angle was that some of the dinosaurs are smart. In this context, it comes when Statham’s driving job turns out to be to transport a cute kid home from school. Another aspect is a French presence in the story: the first film was set in France, this one is in Miami and Statham pays host to a French friend.

The main business on Statham’s agenda is a constant: creative demonstrations of martial arts based violence giving the driver a chance to improvise ways of sorting his opponents out. And there’s no shortage of those. Statham inventively despatches bad guys armed with firemans’ axes by taking them down with first a scaffolding pole and then a firehose, using it to tangle and trap henchmen and then filling it full of water so that they fly off in all directions. Oh, and he shows off his superlative driving skills by driving over a narrow alley so that the car’s wheels touch buildings either side of the gap.

Basically, Statham is Batman without the cape and code against killing. He’s a smart thinker, a supercapable fighter, and above all else you know he’ll commit to his mission — in this case fulfilling his promise to the young boy that he’ll look after him. Of that there is no question. You know the bad guys will be thwarted — it’s just a matter of how inventively and when. And thankfully the film delivers, with an expertly constructed and executed story that sees Statham take on the baddies while being under suspicion by the cops, seeing off the goons before tracking down the guy in charge of the operation.

As written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen and directed by Louis Leterrier it’s a fast, taut, and often funny film that packs the action of a full length feature into its first hour before a skilful segue into a final act — the young boy was targeted because he’s the son of a man who will speak at a conference packed with people from around the world working against the drug trade. The bad guys pump the kid full of a custom virus that he gives to everyone he comes in contact with, and they in turn to people around them…an opportunity to get the dad to off the cream of the international drug policing community.

Gadzooks, the consequences of such a fiendish plot would be catastrophic! Statham’s got to act, and the bad guy personalises things by pumping his own body full of the only stock of antidote. Cue ridiculous fight scene in a jet plummeting from the sky, and other high octane nonsense that gave me a grin pretty much the duration of the film. A lot of people are dismissive of action thrillers like this, dismissing them as braindead — but watch Transporter 2 and you’ll realise just how much intelligence goes into crafting entertainment that slips down so easily.