'The Transporter: Refueled': Something missing from sequel

Disturbing commentary on contemporary preferences: When you try to enter Dumas as a search term into Google, it anticipates that you really want dumbass.

Also disturbing: The two words apply to so much of what you see in The Transporter: Refueled, or as it is commonly known, Transporter 4: Statham Has Left the Building.

Jason Statham's replacement as Frank Martin is rocker-turned-actor Ed Skrein, who played a hairy mercenary in Game of Thrones, a performance that for some reason prompted someone to wonder how he would look in a crew cut behind the wheel of an Audi A8.

Which is where he is in Refueled, aiding a small squad of hookers seeking revenge on the Eastern Bloc(head) pimps who put them on the streets as preteens.

"All for one, and one for all," say the self-styled musketeer hookers, paying homage to Alexandre Dumas, as they scheme against the panderers.

As has been noted, Refueled is an antipandering film that does a certain amount of its own. The ladies wear miniskirts and platinum-blond wigs, often stop what they're doing to make out with each other, apropos of nothing.

Perhaps Dumas would have approved. His Three Musketeers was a famously lusty work that had to be heavily edited and desexualized for uptight non-French readers when first translated back in the mid-19th century.

Dumas was himself an earthy individual reputed to have kept about 40 mistresses. I doubt he would be very much offended at the scene in which Ray Stevenson, as the transporter's lecherous dad, charms his way out of a kidnapping and into the arms of several prostitutes.

In fact, Alexandre Dumas is probably in writer heaven laughing with delight at the way Refueled borrows not just his Musketeers characters but large swaths of The Count of Monte Cristo, whose complex revenge scenario is referenced here extensively.

Dumas is even quoted: "It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live."

The hookers carry around a copy of The Three Musketeers - although it is, hilariously, the Great Illustrated Classics version you read when you were 6.

It is in this spirit that Refueled is delivered - illustrated with a luxury car driving through an airport, up a luggage ramp, through a terminal concourse.

In Furious 7, though, they're parachuting six cars out of a cargo plane and dropping them on highways. That's where Statham has taken his game.

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