"Trsportation is a precise business."
When The Transporter first came out, in 2002, I was fifteen. Seems impossible, but that was seven years ago. And now that I think about it, I guess what the Film-world really needed back then was a white action hero who could kick some serious ass. Or so the Hollywood powers seemed to think, anyway. Sure, it's crass and weird and at least a little troubling to view things that way, but you can't deny there was a vacancy in the category. Arnie and Sly were almost ready to collect Medicare. Keanu Reeves was content to meditate and make Matrix sequels. Bruce Willis was becoming an actor who was "good with kids." Chuck Norris was always a born infomercial pitchman, even at the height of his fame. Steven Seagal was a Buddhist embroiled in lawsuits. And Matt Damon and Daniel Craig were still taking baby steps towards action stardom.
Of course there was Vin Diesel, whose hotness and coolness couldn't be ignored among ladies and gentlemen. Diesel had clearly established himself as a franchise after XxX, The Fast and the Furious and Pitch Black. But there was only one of him, he's racially ambiguous in a way that gets a lot of people's motors running (and may alienate others) and his acting style always makes you think he's basically kidding about the whole thing. All this may go some distance toward explaining how Jason Statham, an English actor most Americans had never heard of, got his name above the title in The Transporter.
A former Olympic diver with a martial-arts background, Statham offered a sort of limey-Zen version of Diesel's Brooklyn-by-way-of-SoCal swagger. He's got the shaved head and the impressively cut physique. He wears nice suits well, despite the impression he gives of being an East End 'ard man ready to bust heads at a football match. Best of all, from a filmmaker's point of view, Statham has a certain stillness or inward-looking grace that translates into unmistakable screen charisma. You know what I mean: He's a Clint Eastwood man who lives by his own rules and thinks before he acts, but when he acts, whoo-boy.
Statham was selected for stardom, not experience (his first acting role had been only four years prior, in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock) by Luc Besson, who is clearly the brains behind the Transporter franchise, even though he direct none. It's a frankly commercial package film of the sort at which Besson excels: a fresh star who undoubtedly worked hard for a relatively low price, a director (Hong Kong legend Corey Yuen) making his English-language debut and Besson's beloved south of France scenery. There's even a little scuba-diving scene that Besson, an underwater-photography junkie, shot himself.
There's plenty to like here, especially for connoisseurs of the action genre, and there's also plenty to make you wonder whether Besson and his long-time co-writer Robert Mark Kamen scribbled their screenplay on a batch of Marseilles cocktail napkins and then lost one or two. Statham is an agreeable if cryptic presence as Frank Martin, an ex-military type turned non-violent criminal whose speciality is delivering people and packages to places in his souped-up BMW without asking questions.
One of his packages turns out to be a woman named Lai (Shu Qi, a gorgeous Taiwan-born star of the Chinese-film world) in a burlap sack. Frank is of course a decent chap at heart, so he breaks his own rules by letting Lai out for a drink of water and a pee. On the other hand, he believes in honour among thugs, so he delivers her as scheduled to a seedy-looking American expat (Matthew Schulze, in a highly enjoyable performance) who seems to have inherited some of Brad Pitt's leftover mack-daddy threads from Fight Club.
That's about as far as I can take you with plot. Not because there's something to give away, but just because it doesn't make any sense after that. The slimy Brad Pitt-looking guy tries to blow Frank up for uncertain reasons, and all heck breaks loose. Lai convinces Frank to take her in, despite the fact that she's the source of all his problems. She's cute as a button, and seductive when she wants to be, as Frank discovers. Then somebody destroys Frank's lovely Mediterranean villa with surface-to-air missiles. Besson, Yuen and company seem to be striving for a screwball-comedy tone here that doesn't work at all, partly because neither of the leads talks much. Statham can't seem to decide whether to try for an American accent or stick with his own, and the lovely Shu Qi basically doesn't speak English.
Lai tells Frank that her family and a bunch of other Chinese immigrants are being smuggled into France to be sold as forced labour. This isn't true, because her father (Ric Young) shows up in one highly confusing scene and seems to be a bad guy in league with the Schulze character. To do what, I'm not sure: smuggle human beings or control French trucking routes or fix Internet airline pricing.
The truth is The Transporter is a much better action film than 80% of the stuff that Hollywood has produced in the last secen years, but you still can't figure out what's supposed to be happening. Yuen has a nice eye, though; aided by his cinematographer Pierre Morel, a former Besson protégé, he delivers an unconventional view of the south of France as not just a deluxe beach party but also an industrial zone of highways, loading docks and fluorescent-lit depots.
Yuen, who has directed several Jet Li flicks, including The Enforcer and the two Legend films, helps a lot evoking the heyday of HK action film, supplying an outstanding car chase through the streets of Marseilles at the very beginning, and much of the rest of the film consists of the action set-pieces he specializes in. We get Frank as, quite literally, the guy without a hatchet in a hatchet fight. We get him, in the film's coolest scene, tangling with a pack of bad guys on the floor of a bus garage soaked with fresh oil, so nobody can stand up for more than a second (until Frank gets a pair of those mechanic's cleats on his feet, that is). We get him sledding down a mountain highway on the severed cab door of a semi-truck.
If Statham isn't quite the equal of Li, or of Yuen's former colleagues Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, he's an able physical performer who seems to do most of his own stunt work. Would he click with the masses? We now know he did, he went on to become a superstar, but it was The Transporter that made that happen. Shu Qi, whose work stretches from Hong Kong action-erotica to Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien's work, is largely squandered here as eye candy, which was expected. But François Berléand, a veteran of French stage and screen, is terrific as the phlegmatic cop who becomes Frank's pursuer and then his accomplice, bringing a touch of Casablanca elegance to what is, at heart, slick, reckless entertainment at its finest.
Transporter 2 (2005) ***½ / *****
"Have a good life. What's left of it."
Jason Statham is the unlikeliest of high-octane action heroes. He's a stocky, ordinary-looking Englishman who doesn't come off all that swift. But as the ex-Special Forces operative Frank Martin, the impeccably dressed, blank-faced professional driver in The Transporter and its sequel, with more tricks - and lives - than James Bond, he's struck gold with a franchise-spawning role. The part allows for the exhibition of some impressive martial-arts skills (he performs almost all his own stunts) while requiring very little in the acting department.
I'll keep this short and sweet: Transporter 2 is precisely what it looks like, which means you won't get a whole lot of brilliant surprises, but if you watched the trailer and thought "Hey, neat-o," then the flick will capably deliver what you're expecting: car chases, gun battles, and fast-paced fisticuffs up the wazoo. You're looking for deep thoughts, well-constructed characters, and a narrative arc that's not insane? Go to the DVD shelf and pick another film. Transporter 2 is the flick to watch when you're in the mood for some fun, simple as that. And it manages to give a lot, at least in the high-octane lunacy department.
After relocating to Miami from the dreamy French seaside, where the Euro-chic first film was set, Frank accepts a short-term assignment chauffeuring a wealthy family's young son. But before long, the boy, for whom Frank has developed a soft spot, is kidnapped and injected with a deadly contagious virus, intended to be passed along to his self-absorbed father (Matthew Modine, in an exceedingly thankless role) and his drug-enforcement colleagues. Frank, whose life is governed by his own strict set of rules, vows to save the boy's life and proceeds to do whatever it takes (the more insanely implausible, the better) to keep his word, while being aggressively pursued by the police, who believe Frank is in on the crime.
Taking over directing duties from Corey Yuen, who was responsible for the first film but, thankfully, did the martial-arts choreography here, is Louis Leterrier, son of the legendary French director François Leterrier - and clearly the right man for the job. In addition to serving as artistic director on the first instalment, he also directed Luc Besson's Jet Li vehicle Danny the Dog, released in 2005 as well.
Purely shallow but never dull, the film wisely pushes the limits of absurdity (more than the first film) to the extreme, making it easier to submit to its sheer camp. But even with all thought processes deactivated, it's hard to tolerate the main female baddie (the American newcomer Kate Nauta), who struts around in lingerie and red stilettos, toting large guns, while delivering one of the worst performances since Milla Jovovich, another clothing-deprived supermodel-turned-actress, appeared in Besson's Fifth Element. That's my only real complaint about Transporter 2. I'm sure there were hundreds of aspiring actresses capable of doing a better job (both acting and looking hot), they just had to look for her.
This is Statham's show all the way, and the irrepressibly intense Londoner has worked pretty hard to build himself a body of work that yells "bad ass character actor." With someone else on board as the transporter, this series could prove to be a fairly interminable chore. But Statham's got gravelly grit and slick screen presence by the bucketful, and it's easy to just enjoy the guy's no-bullshit performance as the kinetic lunacy continues unabated.
Transporter 2 is, all things said and done, a perfectly outlandish and tight-knuckled little action flick, a mindless piece of well-hewn escapism that delivers several borderline-retarded moments of action mayhem - but does it with such style and attitude that one can't help but play along. While it's true that many of the action set-pieces found within come dangerously close to the outright stupidity found in lesser action films, there's a cocked eyebrow and tongue-in-cheek demeanour that clearly indicate the filmmakers are in on the joke. And while it's true that several of the loonier stunts will have you rolling your eyeballs in "oh, come on!" incredulity, the simple fact is that Transporter 2 is quick, crafty, and just kooky enough to make for a net, sunny afternoon of mindless fun with your friends.
It's got an ultra-cool hero, an amazingly hot (albeit weepy) mum, a callous politico dad, a sneering villain with rotten teeth, a strangely sexy stick-figure of a henchwoman, and the always-welcome and nice Inspector Tarconi, reprised to perfection by François Berléand. It's all flash and no brains, but it's also a film that exists for one simple reason: to deliver 80-some minutes of slickly crafted and frequently off-the-wall action sequences. And just like Frank Martin himself, the film doesn't let up until those packages are delivered.
Transporter 3 (2005) **½ / *****
"Do I look like a man who came half-way across Europe to die on a bridge?"
The first Transporter film, a film I like to call "Transporter 1," features a scene in which a missile is fired at the home of Frank Martin (Jason Statham) from about 100 feet away; yet Martin, having seen the missile approach from an upstairs window, is able to escape in a leisurely manner via elevator before the projectile levels his Mediterranean home. Clearly, the laws of time and space do not exist in the Transporter universe.
In the second Transporter film, the aptly titled Transporter 2, Martin dodges certain doom when he's able to drive up a makeshift ramp, flip his Audi A8 upside down in mid-air, and scrape a bomb from its undercarriage with a stationary hook hanging over the scene before the device explodes. Clearly, the laws of physics do not exist in the Transporter universe.
If the natural progression of things were followed, Transporter 3 would probably feature Martin in a breakdancing competition against a werewolf on the moon. Instead, the filmmakers behind the real Transporter 3 made the decision to go light on the unbelievable situations, and the resulting film, while still marginally entertaining, is almost dull by comparison.
Statham reprises his role as Martin, an ex-special forces fighting machine who delivers unmentionable items for undesirable miscreants on a "Don't ask, don't tell" basis. Transporter 3 finds the unflappable Martin back in Europe, forced into driving a childish, befreckled Ukrainian pixie woman named Valentina (the exquisite Natalya Rudakova, in her acting debut) cross-country for a shady American Lance Henriksen look-alike (Robert "T-Bag" Knepper) with a penchant for shooting insubordinate underlings. The catch is that if Martin or his whiny cargo move more than 75 feet away from his car, the sweet exploding bracelets on their arms will blast them to smithereens.
The familiar plot isn't really a problem; what's lacking, however, is a concrete sense of style. Where the first and second films looked as unique as their balletic action sequences played (thanks to its visually forceful directors: Corey Yuen and Louis Leterrier), Transporter 3 presents itself as a choppily-edited, more character-driven espionage thriller, as if awesomely-named rookie director Olivier Megaton had decided to cash in on any leftover Jason Bourne hoopla. But though it's cut like a Bourne film, Transporter 3 is still, at heart, the same old mindless action flick about guys kicking each other in the face and driving their cars into trains, with nothing close to depth, artistry, or social commentary appearing on-screen. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But the most frustrating thing about Transporter 3 is its complete lack of the sort of over-the-top spectacle that upgraded the first two films from "stupid" to "stupid but fun." The refreshingly pretence-free Statham chugs along as he always does in his expressionless way, and several of the fight scenes are decently inventive, but there just isn't the sort of jaw-dropping disregard for reality that made the first two instalments so enjoyable. Breaking stale film laws in the name of entertainment is what put the otherwise-forgettable Transporter franchise on the map to begin with; Megaton's refusal to let the series become any more ridiculous has dragged it into the territory of the forgettable. Such a shame. Thank God Crank 2 is on its way.
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