You have to give Jason Statham credit, I mean when you look at his filmography the man has multiple franchises that he’s fronted over his career. When he isn’t plotting a swift end to his targets in his two Mechanic films, he’s a vital cog in the Expendables machine as he serves back manly banter from multiple action legends. When he isn’t doing that, he’s making giant prehistoric sharks extinct in the Meg movies or getting up to drug fueled, non-PC shenanigans as Chev Chelios in the double whammy of the deranged Crank series.
However, the first ever franchise the properly Stath fronted was as Frank Martin in the absurdly slick Transporter movies that were written and produced by Luc Besson in an attempt to coat the action genre in euro-themed chaos and in 2008, Martin and his curious habit of having some of the most homoerotic fist fights in cinema history, finally transported himself to a trilogy. However, was this third package a welcome arrival, or was it clearly marked return to sender?
Frank Martin – purveyor of strict car etiquette and continuously disrobing during elaborate fist fights – as ditched Miami in order to return back to the French Riviera to soak up the sun and fish with his best mate, Inspector Tarconi. However, when a car smashes through his house one night containing a wounded rival Transporter and an unconscious girl, Frank finds himself drawn into another sprawling conspiracy that seems way more complicated than it needs to be. You see, the girl is Valentina Tomilenko, the party-happy daughter of the Ukrainian Environmental Agency Minister and she’s been kidnapped in order to leverage her father into turning a blind eye to the illegal transport of toxic waste. So far, so Transporter, but after the other guy blows up like an oil refinery after an ambulance takes him a certain distance from his car, Frank is laid out by an assailant and wakes to find out that he’s now next in line to transport Valentina to Budapest.
Hooked up to a bracelet that will blow if he gets within a certain distance from his vehicle, he’s given his instructions by the villainous Johnson, but seeing as Frank Martin has always been a resourceful sort, he takes every opportunity he can to try and get his exploding wrist bling defused before he finishes his task. Of course, to do that he’ll have to get into a bunch of imaginative scrapes that requires beating the crap out of henchmen with his shirt off (naturally), jump cars onto trains and try and put up with his annoying passenger while she decides to pop party pills in the middle of a car chase.
Can Frank figure out how to finesse his way out of this mess without turning into a smoking crater – and more importantly, will the movie’s crazed editing actually allow you to focus on anything that’s actually going on?
Aside from delivering the Stath to us as a fully fledged action star, the Transporter movies have been mostly a source of slick, cartoony guff that’s delivered outlandish martial art sequences along with far fetched car chases that’s resulted in fun, but throwaway epics that are about as memorable as trying to recall whatever shit you did on the way home from that epic bender you had the night before – you think it was fun, but fuck knows if you can remember why. Still, the fight scenes were imaginative and if you didn’t mind the complete absence of physics in some of those car stunts, both of Frank Martin’s previous outings were a bit of a giggle which is something the third movie sadly forgets to do.
It’s weird, because on paper, Transporter 3 does virtually every thing the previous entries did and yet the whole thing proves to be the equivalent of a car engine that refuses to turn over on a cold winter’s morning. I’m not exactly sure how a film that sees its hero remove items of his own clothing, midfight, to take out a gang of thugs; has him float a sunken car from the bottom of a lake by releasing the air from the tyres into a balloon and has him avoid exploding by keeping up with his stolen car by racing after it on a bicycle ends up being so un-entertaining, but if I had to chance a guess, it would be the fault of Olivier Megaton.
While film historians will no doubt tut at the injustice that a man with the surname “Megaton” ended up making so many dreary action flicks (after this, he went on to make two Taken sequels with similarly colourless results), he really has no one to blame but himself as the director seems to trust zippy, distracting editing tricks over the fact that he has some legitimately solid people working for him.
Statham is as as aggressively Statham as ever, delivering his dialogue with that dependable voice and continuing to have great timing, be it delivering a withering kiss-off line or engaging in one of the many perky brawls the film puts him in. However, what’s the point of having the legendary Corey Yuen return to stage more amusingly ambitious fight scenes when the director virtually obliterates the rhythm and flow of it with the patchiest editing you’ve ever seen. Surely the sight of Frank outwitting a giant of a man by luring him into a hole to make them the same height is conceptually cool enough without any bells and whistles from the editing department (actually, the whole fighting scene set in the garage could have actually been something special), but the quick, dizzying cuts not only diminish the efforts put in by Statham, Yuen and the stunt team, but actually makes a mess of the choreography to the point where it’s virtually impossible to follow.
Adding to the growing annoyance is the fact that Prison Break’s Robert Knepper is utterly wasted as a rather bland villain and Natalya Rudakova’s female lead may be the most irritating character in an action movie while she complains constantly, wanders off to neck a bottle of vodka then their lives are in danger and even demands that Frank do a strip tease before they indulge in a sex scene that no one but Luc Besson himself would probably find arousing. However, I feel that Rudakova’s inexperience isn’t totally to blame when you realise that Besson discovered her working in a hairdressers and gave her acting lessons before casting her here which all seems a bit iffy considering the accusations of grooming that’s surrounded him for a while.
Still, none of this excuses the fact that the Transporter franchise has suddenly become inexplicably dull despite seemingly trying to reverse engineer the kind of full-speed-ahead weirdness we got in the first Crank.
The Stath is on fine form and the action strives to try and retain the spark of 80s Jackie Chan, but some flat direction and some ill-advised editing that makes Michael Bay seen like David Lean just transports the goofy joy clean out of something that should be some mindless fun.
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