"Do I look like a man who came half way across Europe to die on a bridge?"
French filmmaker Luc Besson is back in the writing saddle with previous Transporter collaborator Robert Kamen for another sequel I don't remember anybody asking for. As far as directors go, it looks like Santa Claus decided to answer at least one of my prayers over the last few years and crowbarred Louis "The Terror" Leterrier off of this one. Then again, he was already working on The Incredible Hulk at the time, so I doubt he was beating down Besson's door to take another shot at personally tasering me in the balls. Instead, this time we've got relative unknown Olivier Megaton who plants his ass in the director's chair with nothing to support him beyond a few movies I've never heard of and one of the most amazing last names ever seen by the eyes of mortal man. Returning to the role that continues to earn him paychecks is "love him or hate him" actioner Jason Statham. Me? I like Jason Statham. Along with Bruce Willis, he proves that the folliclly challenged can still be viable tough guy sex symbols.
Speaking of Statham, it looks like our hero Frank Martin may have taken the old "action hero plans to retire and settle down" axiom seriously when we run into him while he's enjoying a casual fishing trip with his French cop buddy Inspector Tarconi. Said peace and quiet is quickly shattered though, much like one of the walls of Frank-O's French villa is when a guy named Malcolm Manville crashes an Audi through it. Double M's one of Frankenstein's old associates in his former career as a Transporter. After getting out of the business, F-Bomb was approached by some very insistent goons who wanted to hire him, but he passed the job into M-Squared's lap. Given his mangled state when he shows up at Frank-N-Fuhrter's place, obviously shit didn't turn out so well in this case for Mr. Manville. "Manville" of course being the nickname given to Bill O'Reilly's colon by his harem of secret boyfriends whom he keeps behind lock and key in his basement. Welcome to Manville, population: 50 billion dead sperm cells.
Rather than play the cloak & dagger thing when it comes to saving Mal's life, our hero calls for an ambulance immediately and they take MM away... only to explode nearby because nobody realized that Mallo Cup was wearing one of those exploding proximity bracelet-majiggers that used to be so popular in futuristic prison movies that always forced the hero together with a comically mismatched counterpart lest they both become convict pâté if they parted ways. Since they don't look like sci-fi convention geeks, Frankie and the paramedics (good name for a '50s do-wop group) overlooking something like that is understandable. However, the stupid part is that no one bothered to look in the backseat of Malware's car, thus no one noticed the prone body of a "dirty in that kinda hot way where you'd just try to hold your breath long enough to get your DNA hose wet" female passenger named Valentina. She also has one of the bracelets and, once he's been knocked out and kidnapped, so too does you-know-who. Personally, I could really stand to see one of those on that flesh-colored-beard jackass from "The Hills". Actually, every waste-of-space involved with that show should probably be fitted with similar jewelry that explodes if they come
within 50ft of a TV camera, if for nothing else than to prevent the further retardation of America's already greatly deficient youth. Not the fun kind of MTV retardation that my generation got from exposure to "Beavis & Butthead" or "The Brothers Grunt" either, but the kind of irritating retardation or "irritardation". It should be punishable by a pick-axe buried through the sinus cavity for both its creators and its viewers.
Since he was the one who recommended Malcolm for the job in the first place (and since he'd rather not die with a slug in his brain), Frank takes the job offered to him by American corporate mercenary asshole Mr. Johnson. Though one of Mr. Martin's main rules is "I work alone", he's had no luck adhering to that rule for the first two movies, so why start now. Valentina thus tags along with him now, but to help Frank keep his "tough guy who changes for no one" demeanor, it's only because taking her along keeps her from getting a second mouth blown out the back of her head and good guys don't let perfectly good bed warmers go to waste. Some people think this is mandatory to gain female viewers with an inevitable love story between the two, but it's actually because studio execs know it's harder to sell the 18-35 male demographic on pure sausage-fests. Honestly, Tina's the only female character in the ENTIRE movie! Funny how Leterrier just threw Frank Martin out of the closet recently in an LA Times interview too...
From here the flick's pretty much what you expect it to be: Frank's gotta take Package A to Destination B while stunt driving through Obstacle C and Car Chase D, then beating up Goon Squad E in Shirtless Fight Sequence F while finding Common Ground G and Blossoming Romance H with Female Ride-Along I before eventually foiling Evil Corporate Scheme J with Heroic Finale K, prompting Happy Ending L. This stuff's so simple to put together, I'm surprised Ikea didn't get a co-director credit. I'll bet the DVD comes with half-Dutch instructions and three different sizes of hex wrench.
Actually, things are stirred up just a smidge with the inclusion of a third party, so things get slightly more complicated this time... in that Frank just has more people to beat up and out drive... and in that I resorted to using the term "smidge". You can still predict where it's all leading to, but in the end at least it's more watchable than the first two. There's very little CGI car action, favoring traditional auto stunt work instead. And most importantly, no brain hemorrhaging moments that ask us to forgo suspending our disbelief in favor of outright eviscerating it. Sure, there are a few goofy stunt moments, but these are the necessary evil centerpiece in the action movie dinner spread, and I'll take Frank's X-Games peddle pushing and two-wheel side-ride car tricks over that mother fucking "car bomb crane hook" bullshit from last time. I get a pain in my left arm and a twitch in the left half of my face just thinking about it... Yeah, Transporter 3 is definitely the better of the three movies and gives me renewed hope that possible future installments won't be nicknamed "Hoover" by the other movies on the shelves if they ever get made. Sadly though, as is the way of ancient box office law, the better movie in the series gets the least bank (it opened at #7) and as go the receipts so go the likelihood of Transporter 4: the Legend of Curly's Gold.
