Silly but stylish, this sequel to The Transporter is, like the original, all about the chases and fight scenes. It’s about the usual for a sequel — 2/3 of the quality of the original, but like its title character, it still delivers.

Jason Statham returns as Frank, the unflappable former special services guy who is prepared for anything and never gives up.

We get into the action right away when Frank, now located in Miami, is the subject of an attempted carjacking by the Black Eyed Peas. Okay, the carjackers just look like them. Fergie-wannabe and the rest are quickly dispatched, and Frank is on time for his pick up — Jack, the young son of the fabulously wealthy US Drug Czar (Mathew Modine). Frank has been driving him for a month, and they have become good friends. Frank has also become friendly with Audrey (Amber Valletta), Jack’s mother. She asks Frank to take Jack to his doctor’s appointment so she can get the house ready for his surprise party. But things go wrong, and Jack is kidnapped.

It will be many car chases, shoot-outs, and kicks and punches later before it all gets resolved. The fight choreography (by fight master Corey Yuen) is imaginative and entertaining, the chases are a popcorn pleasure, and the pacing is pure adrenaline. Frank does things with a fire extinguisher that, even when seen, are hard to believe — but lots of fun to watch.

The chemistry between Frank and Audrey and the visit from Frank’s old friend Tarconi (François Berleand) are distractions that don’t add much, and there’s not a lot of interest or energy in the villains and what they are trying to do. There’s one killer (Katie Nauta) who tries to be all twisted and crazy, but doesn’t quite make it, even though she likes to shoot people while she is wearing little more than bikini underwear, stockings and garter belt and high, high red heels. But like the rest of the movie, she’s less than meets the eye.

Parents should know that the movie has non-stop action violence, with many scary and dangerous car chases, shoot-outs, and kicking/punching fights. Many characters are injured or killed. Crotch injuries are played for humor. The movie includes mild sexual references, a sexual situation, brief nudity, and someone giving “the finger.” There are references to a cocaine cartel and to bioterrorism.

Families who see this movie should talk about how Frank decides what he will and will not do. Why didn’t he work with the police? Why are he and Tarconi friends?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the original The Transporter and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and The Professional (both very violent).

Audacious, ambitious, and provocative but uneven and ultimately unsatisfying, this long-delayed film adapts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of class, love, and power, The Great Gatsby, to the present. Instead of Jay Gatsby, the gangster who can’t forget the girl he lost, we have Summer G, the gangsta, the head of a successful hip-hop recording label.

Richard T. Jones is commanding as Summer G, whose college romance with Skye (Chenoa Maxwell) ended when she married Chip Hightower (Blair Underwood), heir to a publishing dynasty. He has taken a house in the Hamptons not far from where the Hightowers have a home.

When Skye’s cousin Tre (Andre Royo) comes to interview Summer G, Chip asks him to cover for him so that he can see his girlfriend without Skye’s finding out. Tre refuses, until Chip reminds him that the magazine Tre works for is owned by Chip’s father.

Summer G then puts the same kind of pressure on Tre. He will not cooperate with the interview unless Tre helps him see Skye. Again, Tre refuses at first, then reluctantly agrees.

Summer G’s recording artists are staying with him. One who has not had a hit for a while becomes increasingly dependent on his girlfriend, who goes away for what she says will be just a few days and then stops returning his calls. Another becomes bitter and manipulative when she believes Summer G is not giving her the chance she deserves.

The Fitzgerald novel has plenty of material for an update that raises some contemporary issues of race and class and culture, but this film falters and misses the point and butchers the metaphors, turning a brilliant story into a soapy love triangle.

Jones has a commanding presence and Underwood does what he can with a cardboard cad of a character. But Royo is weak and Maxwell is hopelessly bad and the uneven, bumpy narrative and long delay between completion and release support the rumor that the movie has been recut following unssuccessful test screenings. Fitzgerald famously placed a green light on the dock in this novel. This review is intended to place a red light on any plan to see this film.

Parents should know that this movie has extremely strong language (including the n-word), drinking, smoking, drug references, sexual references and situations, and violence, including guns, with characters injured and killed.

Families who see this movie should talk about why Skye decided to stay with Chip instead of Summer G and how the movie differs from the original book.

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy the earlier film versions of “The Great Gatsby,” especially the with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and a television miniseries.

It’s a classic American success story. An immigrant with a dream and a vision works hard and becomes wealthy and successful. He marries the girl he fell in love with at age 10 and they and their son live in a beautiful apartment in New York, on top of the world. Unfortunately, all of this is built on selling hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal weapons to the very last people in the world we would trust with a water pistol. “There are 550 million firearms — one for every 12 people on the plant,” he tells us. “The only question is: how do we arm the other eleven?”

Nicolas Cage is Yuri Orlav, who moved from the Soviet Union to New York’s “Little Odessa” with his parents when he was a boy. They pretended to be Jewish to be allowed to emigrate and his father got so into it that he attends services at the local synagogue. Yuri’s brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) puts a “Beware of the Dog” poster in the kitchen of the family’s restaurant. They have no pet — it means “beware of the dog in me.” Yuri asks Vitaly to help him in his purchase and sale of illegal arms, because he is the only one Yuri trusts. They agree to be “brothers in arms.”

Yuri has good luck and good timing. He arrives on the scene just as the market for illegal guns and other weapons is heating up. He picks up weapons abandoned by the US because it is cheaper to leave them behind than to ship them.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, almost all of its stockpile of arms goes to Yuri and his competition, due to corruption and neglect. “Those who know don’t care and those who care don’t know.” Yuri is selling Kalashnikov assault rifles, grenades, and bombs into eight of the world’s top ten war zones. He arranges to meet the successful model he has loved from afar since he was a child, and they get married and have a baby. They live in a beautiful apartment and have plenty of money. If Yuri thinks about what people do with what he is selling, it is just to “hope they miss.” So he can sell them some more.

After all, he says, “guns and tobacco kill more people. At least mine has a safety.”

Then things begin to go wrong. In the illegal arms business, neither the competitors nor the customers play by the rules.

This is a classic hubris rise-and-fall story, chillingly real, contemporary, and very scary. Cage is perfectly cast — the arms dealer as rock star — and Leto delivers a sensitive performance as the volatile and vulnerable younger brother.

The movie’s biggest weakness is that it gets so overheated by its message that it gets heavy-handed, especially when Ethan Hawke as an incorruptable federal agent stands in for the screenwriter to remind us of the meaning of what we have just seen. The conclusion is powerful enough to deliver that message without the speeches.

Parents should know that this is a very violent film about arms dealers that makes its points by portraying frequent, brutal, and explicit gun and other weapons-related peril and violence. Characters are wounded and killed. Characters also use very strong language, drink, smoke, use and sell drugs, and one develops a substance abuse problem. The movie includes explicit sexual references and situations, including nudity, adultery, prostitutes, and group sex.

Families who see this movie should talk about how they can learn more about illegal arms dealers and the challenges of dealing with them under international law. They should also look into the movie’s statement about the role that governments, incuding the US, play in providing weapons to other countries.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Traffic, Goodfellas, and Blow.

Apparently, when Nick Cannon was growing up, he dreamed of being Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. It seems he also wanted to be Jon Cryer in Hiding Out. So, when he got a chance to produce a feature film for himself, he combined the two and came up with “The Underclassman.”

From Beverly Hills Cop we have the opening sequence. Bust goes wrong, cover gets blown, damage gets done, and back at the station the choleric police chief yells about how our hero has to learn to follow the rules and start respecting authority. And they even throw in a father who had a distinguished record as a cop before he died, so our hero has a daunting standard to live up to and an empty place to fill. (Do you think young Nick Cannon might have been influenced by, say, a couple of Tom Cruise movies like Top Gun or A Few Good Men?)

Then a kid at a posh private school is found dead and the police need an officer who can go undercover as a student, so Tracey (Cannon) gets one more chance. Now we move into Hiding Out mode, as Tracy enrolls as a senior to see if he can find out what happened, and, oh yes, possibly to see if he can finish out his senior year and qualify for a high school diploma to replace that G.E.D.

Tracey’s culture-clash encounters with the rich kids at the school are more race-related than age- or class-related. While he is trying to become best friends with the school’s alpha male and getting acquainted with a pretty Spanish teacher (Roselyn Sanchez) who agrees to some private lessons, he finds time for assorted wisecracks and shoot-outs. It’s straight off the assembly line with no surprises, but pleasantly entertaining thanks to Cannon’s being almost as charming as he thinks he is.

Parents should know that the movie has a good deal of violence, including shoot-outs. Characters are injured and killed. There is some strong and crude language, including jokes about herpes and potty humor. The movie includes teen drinking and illegal drugs. A drug is given to a teenager without his knowledge or consent.

Families who see this movie should talk about why it was hard for Tracey to take himself and other people seriously. What was the most important thing he learned from his experience at the school?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Hiding Out and Never Been Kissed.

Director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) turns his Brazilian –cinematic—jujitsu on an emotionally gnarled book by England’s spy king, John LeCarré, with an equatorial glare that dares the audience to keep up with characters bathed in every shade of black, white and gray. A movie this ambitious will win over some audiences, attracted by fine acting and stylized directing, but will lose others in its necessary but lengthy flashbacks and its melancholy. While the end is a bitter pill to swallow, the message of redemption through love sweetens the taste.

Within the first minutes, Tessa (Rachel Wiesz), impassioned young wife of Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), is dead. Under the harsh Kenyan sun, mid-level British diplomat Justin must unravel the motive for her murder as well as her reasons for not confiding in him, his guilt for having not protected her, and his horror at having faltered in his faith in her. His search takes him to England, to Berlin, to Sudan, to Kenya’s wilds, via flashbacks and breakdowns, but ultimately it takes him back to Tessa once he can at last understand the events that tore her from him.

Some audiences might groan at the first signs of a pharmaceutical conspiracy being the cause of Tessa’s death –what movie hasn’t had a heartless, profit-minded beast of a company as the two-dimensional baddie of late?—but that catalyst merely serves as a means to an end. It is in the characters, individual conundrums, where the story takes place and Kenya is a scene-stealing diva, as enigmatic as the best of the human actors. Meirelles shoots the story in that grainy, jerky style that favors harshly-lit honesty over romantic niceties. Those looking for another windswept Fiennes-in-Africa love affair of the “English Patient” variety should go elsewhere. The camera lingers instead on crowded shantytowns punctuated by drifts of garbage, on bodies at the morgue, on a crowded market where serpentine lines wait for an AIDS test.

Fiennes as Justin does an excellent job displaying a vast range of emotions through the filter of self-contained understatement, the constant –i.e. loyal—gardener of title. With fine performances by Danny Huston, Hubert Koundé, Richard McCabe, and Bill Nighy, there is no dearth of noteworthy acting on the screen and it is in the small personal skirmishes that the broader conflicts of the film are taking place.

Meirelles is hungry behind the camera, eager to tell the story and happy to turn the lens toward the unusual beauty of Kenya. His enthusiasm, paired with a superb cast, elevates this movie above a typical adventure/romance, but his style –showing the country and the characters warts and all—will leave some audiences longing for a two-dimensional hero to cheer rather than committing to this two-plus hour elegy.

Parents should be aware that this movie is for mature audiences for its themes as well as for its brutality. On-screen characters are killed, chased, beaten, shot and poisoned. There are references to rape, torture, murder, kidnap and theft. There is non-sexual nudity and reference to adultery, sexual favors, AIDS, homosexuality, teenage motherhood. Many scenes depict poverty and related subjects such as thievery, graft, hardship and the perceived low cost of human life. Characters are in peril, whether from rampaging bandits, European thugs, sophisticated business types or their own jealousies. Characters drink and smoke socially. Decisions people make about their personal loyalties, love and passion for justice cause a domino effect, rippling through the lives of those all around.

Families who see this movie should talk about the moral triumphs and failings each character evinces. Which characteristics do you admire? Tessa is the snowball that sets in motion what follows but why must Justin follow the course that he does, especially by the Lake?

Families looking for more of LeCarré’s textured and flawed characters will enjoy Cold War classics “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Smiley’s People”. While easier to find in book form, a search for the BBC miniseries adaptations is well worth the effort as they star one of Britain’s great actors, Alec Guinness, as Smiley, the unassuming mastermind for British counter-espionage.

Many, including “Third Man” author Graham Greene, have called LeCarré’s “The Spy who came in from the Cold” the greatest spy book ever written and some families may wish to watch Richard Burton turn in a superb performance as the title character, a disillusioned double agent, in Martin Ritt’s 1965 adaptation.

For those who enjoy Meirelles fresh if frenetic pace behind the camera, “City of God” is intensely brutal but lyric in scope. It garnered four Academy Award nominations for his vibrant look at characters growing up in a Brazilian favela, or slum.

Thanks to guest critic AME.