Transit (2012)

Too much of everything

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

5.7 rating as I write this. Really? This film was AWFUL, an exemplar of bad film making. Characters that make no sense. Criminals smart enough to heist millions of dollars from a security truck apparently left their brains behind. Suburban mum turns in to Rambona, with an everlasting gun clip in her AK47 that she is mostly firing into the sky. Ex-con dad is sprinting around with a bullet wound in his thigh, a severed finger and a machete slash to save the day and reunite his family. A cop is run down and killed by the loudest car in America as he apparently never heard it coming because his back was turned to it. Cliché after cliché, bad film making at it's finest, AVOID.

A bunch of thugs orchestrate an armored car robbery, killing the guards in the process. The next morning on the run with the money, they find out through their police scanner that there's a roadblock ahead so they decide to park at a rest stop. When an SUV packed with luggage on the roof parks nearby they get an idea- exchange their package with a piece of luggage from the SUV, follow the owner and later pick up the money. The plan works well, the SUV goes through the roadblock and so do the bad guys despite misgivings by the police.But when it comes to getting the money back, the bad guys get impatient and lose it. They try to drive the SUV off the road at a speed trap. The driver of the SUV is caught and because he's on parole, he's jailed. His family rents two rooms in a motel. The bad guys break into one of them but it's the room that doesn't have the money. The police arrive and the bad guys leave. Once again they have to catch up with the family later to get the money. When the wife by accident discovers the money, she blames the husband who was previously jailed for white collar crime. She leaves him with the money in the middle of the road and drives with the two sons away. He hides the money and has to figure out how to get his family back with whom the bad guys have caught up.Transit is one of the better movies of the genre. It has plenty of good action and violence but it's also intelligent as the father and his nemesis figure out ways to outsmart each other. The cast is excellent: Caviezel, Röhm, Frain shine in their roles. The bad guy is bad and you can't wait for him to face justice while Caviezel is immensely likable. This is a B movie like they used to make them decades ago- a good cast, good story, well-made-- just barely below an A level movie. I enjoyed that almost the entire movie takes place outdoors in Louisiana.

The best thing about Transit is that it is realistically photographed in the Louisiana bayou country. I thoroughly expected someone to get eaten by one of the alligators or poisoned by one of the swamp dwelling snakes.The Sidwell family is going on a camping trip to mend some fences. Dad played by Jim Cavaziel has just been released from federal prison for some white collar fraud and he's trying to get to know wife Elizabeth Rohm and kids Jake Cherry and Sterling Knight.But while they're trying to get the family unit functioning, a gang led by Harold Frain has committed a 4 million dollar armored car heist and to elude the police blockade put the loot in the Sidwell's wagon. The rest of the film is the Sidwell family being terrorized by the crooks who want their loot which for a while the family does not they have. When they find out, Rohm suspects the worst about Cavaziel.Nothing terribly special about Transit, not the greatest film I ever saw, but it hardly rates some of the other venomous reviews I read.

Acting is OK, cinematography OK, the sound is good. But this is one of those story that relies for 100% of the time on the pure stupidity of it's characters to drive it's story. If any of them had an IQ of over 60, the conflict would have been solved in 15 minutes. Instead it drags on and on, making less and less sense until you don't even care, because anything that happens can be undone in a heartbeat by some new stupidity. Desperate to show how cool/loyal to their family these characters are, the movie consists mainly of badly constructed, artificial situations that would only happen in magic movie land. I can usually ignore a fair share of this, but here it's completely overdone.Wouldn't recommend this, even if this is your only alternative to utter boredom.