Raucous Transporter 3 Delivers
Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is, for all intents and purposes, retired. He’s back in France, now spending his days fishing with police detective and friend Tarconi (François Berléand) instead of sitting behind the wheel of his Audi dodging speeding cars and even deadlier bullets.
Jason Statham and Natalya Rudakova in Lionsgate's Transporter 3
But this peaceful calm is shattered when he wakes up on an examination table naked save for a pretty silver bracelet filled with powerful explosives strapped to his wrist. Seems an American named Johnson (Robert Knepper, just oozing smarmy villainous rage) needs Frank’s services to courier the daughter of a Russian diplomat (Jeroen Krabbé) from point A to pint B in a single piece, and he’s not about to take no for an answer.
Next thing he knows the world’s best transporter is back on the road, the sexy woman Valentina (newcomer Natalya Rudakova) by his side certain neither one of them is going to make it out of this predicament alive. But she doesn’t know Frank, and while the rules he lives by are all made to be broken the one thing nonnegotiable is that death, while it can playfully knock on the window, is never allowed to come through the car door.
I should hate Transporter 3. I thought the first film was decent enough for what it was, but that 2005 sequel sent me so far up the wall I almost wanted to scream in excruciating mind-numbing pain. With that being the case, a third chapter should have been downright unbearable, nothing creators Luc Besson (Angel-A, The Fifth Element) or Robert Mark Kamen (A Walk in the Clouds) had up their sleeves going to be enough to make up for the moribund idiocy of their character’s previous adventure.
Sometimes it is simply wonderful to be proven wrong. The truth of the matter is I loved Transporter 3, and while the sequel is nothing more than a pumped up B-movie on steroids it moves with such beautifully pugnacious grace watching it is almost invigorating joy.
Part of me almost can’t believe I’m saying this, but Besson and Kamen, working with young French director Olivier Megaton (whose last name was just made to helm this type of thing), have crafted a film that even surpasses their 2002 original. While the pacing could probably have been improved, and while nothing that happens would even remotely be construed as surprising, this thing packs serious punch.
The movie connects on a visceral cartoon level of rock’em-sock’em mayhem impossible to resist (a bit in a car auto shop borders on priceless), and those inclined to enjoy this sort of thing are going to have such a grand time they’re probably not even going notice the fact Rudakova can’t act or that the main reason for all this to even being happening in the first place doesn’t make a lick of sense. All they’re going to see are the high-flying fisticuffs and the spectacular stunt work (the majority of it thankfully practical, not CGI), and that’s not even close to being a bad thing.
Don’t get me wrong. If The Bank Job proved nothing else it proved that Statham needs to stop making stuff like this and move towards crafting entertainments with more on their mind then how quickly the finely chiseled actor can break an attacker's nose or how fast he can rip his shirt off. But that’s a discussion for another day because, for all its simpleminded minimalism and obviousness, Transporter 3 gets the job done. Like I said before, sometimes it’s just wonderful to be proven wrong.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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