Sunday, December 07, 2008

Transporter 3

Jason Statham returns to our screens (after a shaky appearance as a driver in Death Race) as a driver of a different sort and a somewhat more familiar role in his third outing as the rule-confined loner Frank Martin in Transporter 3.

It's not made abundantly clear if this time Frank is fully or semi-retired, but nevertheless he's forced by a big bad-guy boss-man Johnson (Prison Break's Robert Knepper) to go on a mission to deliver a 'package'. This time he's rigged with a magnetic explosive which will detonate- killing him if he wanders too far away from his beloved Audi. He's also got a passenger in the form of a sweet piece of fluff called Valentina (Natalya Rudakova) a freckled, red-headed Ukrainian who is annoying as she is sexy.

The plot to this is beyond ridiculous, even for a Transporter movie, hell even for a mindless action movie. What in the nine hells was Luc Besson doing while writing this? Painting? Cooking? Masturbating? Because he certainly didn't seem to have actually written anything - I just don't get why the bad-guy had to do what he does, it's really making life a lot harder for himself. However, the insane unbelievable stunts, Statham's fights and chases as well as Valentina being annoying (or sexy) almost completely distract you from any semblance of story. Still it would have been nice to have some small thread of plot no matter how daft, at least to hold against the most rudimentary of analysis, but this is a basic popcorn flick, so just roll with it I guess.

Cory Yuen choreographs some brilliant fight scenes for director Olivier Megaton and it seems like Frank has to take down more enemies than usual at once, but they're not as good as in previous installments. After seeing him take down a host of thugs with a fire hose before; using his clothing as a weapon this time round seems a little naff. There does seem to be some incredible stunts here and completely over the top even physically impossible which sometimes converts cool to laughable but I'll leave you judge those for yourself.

Final Verdict: 95% of 3rd movies don't turn out to be as good as their predecessors and Transporter 3 is no exception. It has none of the character or spirit of the first movie or the more intense adrenaline action of it's sequel, but that said- it holds it's own as an action movie.

Colonel Creedon Rating: ****

Youtube Trailer / Official Site / IMDB Entry / Wikipedia Entry

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I get a vibe of disappointment but it gets 4 Stars? You make much sense as ever Colonel.

Major General Creedon said...

It was like Quantum Of Solace. It was a good movie on it's own but disappointing as a sequel to an established franchise.