Nobody Smokes Cigarettes Like the French

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2002)

For me Francois Berleand was the star of this movie as the worldlywise French cop who knows exactly who the Transporter is and what he does, but he approaches his job like a chess game where he's always a few moves ahead of his opponent. Like the great Jean Gabin in those wonderful old black and white flicks, Berleand speaks volumes with a shrug, a glance, a half smile or (of course) a puff of the de rigueur cigarette, without which it's impossible to be properly Gallic and suave. Mr. Statham, for his part, seemed most engaged in the proceedings during his verbal rope-a-dope with Mr. Berleand.
I have liked Mr. Statham a lot not just in those English gangster movies but in "The One" with Jet Li and John Carpenter's "Ghosts of Mars," he deserves to be a star in his own right and this movie co-starring a vehicle should have been the right vehicle for him. It's a shame he was given so little to do, aside from kicking the crap out of many people, which he does quite handily. There's a lot of talk about "rules" in this movie and the movie itself obeys the rules of martial arts onscreen, one being that when the hero is facing a bunch of bad guys, they're only allowed to attack him one or two at a time, and they're not allowed to have guns unless they stand so close that the hero can disarm them. Jacie Chan's classic shtick of picking up any handy item to use as a weapon is alive and well here, likewise Chan's trademark element of farce/slapstick, e.g. the oil-slick brouhaha. And we have death-defying stunts galore and tire-squealing car chases and all sorts of goings -on. Yet somehow Mr. Statham himself seems to get lost in the proceedings.
It's really not his fault. His character is very sketchily written, the plot seems to have been made up as they went along a la "Casablanca," and the desired chemistry between him and the Chinese heroine just doesn't happen. I don't know who the actress is or what she did previously, and she's, you know, cute and all that, but she just did nothing for me whatsoever, and apparently not much for Mr. Statham either. She's no Bai Ling, let's say, much less a Lucy Liu or Kelly Hu or--dare I mention the name--Michelle Yeoh aka Michelle Kwan. She's a cypher and even the writers seem to have grasped that; look how long they keep her bound and gagged onscreen to try to generate some fetishistic interest in what's happening with her. "The Big Hit," another movie with a kidnapped Chinese chick falling for the kidnapper, only took about five minutes to generate the romantic oomph that his one never really achieves. The movie doesn't even bother including the usually obligatory closing shot of the of the hero & heroine alone together, as though acknowledging they were never really an item.
As we knew in advance from the trailer, there's a scene where the bad guys approach Statham's house to kill him and choose to deviate from the French tradition of subtlety by firing a rocket launcher at the place. The scene goes on so long it becomes funny, but stupid-funny not clever-funny. One would think the bad guys at least would have made sure Statham was even home before unleashing more firepower than, I think, the French army used at Dienbenphu. They seemed to know in advance they would be undisturbed by the arrival of police during their assault; maybe they'd read the script, assuming there was one. But it did afford the French cop one of the best lines in the movie, when he drily asked if Statham would care to account for the thousands of rounds of spent ammo surrounding the remains of his house. "Maybe they had the wrong house...." Good one, Centurion!
Bottom line, I did enjoy this but not as much as I was hoping I would. If they do a sequel, maybe Mr. Besson himself will take charge next time & give us another cult classic like "La Femme Nikita" or "The Professional" ....