Fast action and paper thin characters...

Rating: 6/10 (14 March 2009)

There are certain action movie premises that never go away despite the fact that they always produce movies that are clones of countless unimpressive action movies that came before. The kidnapped child, the raped and murdered wife, the otherwise wronged family, or in this case, the crusade against corrupt businessmen, smugglers, drug dealers, etc. Take your pick, they generally all turn out about the same, don't they?
Jason Statham is inarguably today's fastest rising action star. He blasted onto the scene with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (a smashing action movie despite what I can't get over thinking is just the goofiest title) and soon followed it up with other action movies like Crank and Snatch which are absolutely overflowing with awesomeness.
The Transporter movies are great vehicles for Statham, although this one was hardly an impressive first outing. It starts out great, with four guys scrambling madly out of a bank they've just robbed and jumping into his car, where he calmly sits motionless and informs them that there are four of them but the deal was three and then proceeds to list off all the reasons why four guys just won't do, including that it throws off the weight calibration of his suspension and will exceed the amount of gas that he has allotted for this particular delivery.
The situation is, ah, resolved, and he puts the pedal down and leads the French police on an exaggerated high speed chase through the streets and alleyways of Marseilles that is so overblown that it promises to become one of those movies like Wanted or Shoot 'Em Up that are soaked in every excess imaginable but are nevertheless tons of fun.
And for a lot of the movie that's what we get, but unfortunately its also populated with paper thin characters and cartoonish villains involved in a preposterous human smuggling plot.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Statham is, as the title informs us, a Transporter by trade. He makes his living by delivering things without asking questions and commands a conspicuously massive salary. The shadiness of his clients is to be expected, hence his insistence on never giving his or learning their names. He has three rules about his services  I forget the order, but they involve never changing the deal in any way once an agreement has been made (hence the tense confusion at the beginning of the movie), never giving names, and never looking in the package being delivered.
When you're dealing with the kind of people that he deals with, it's generally best not to really know much about what's really going on. Especially when you have a friendly but attentive police detective making occasional house calls to your beautiful beach house and wondering about things like getaways being made in cars exactly like yours and when that last car later gets found blown to pieces with two police officers in the trunk. If nothing else, the French seem pretty generous with the benefit of the doubt!
But despite this string of good luck, he breaks one of his own rules on his latest delivery, accidentally buying an Orangina for the contents of his package and then letting her go off into the woods to pee. We never learn much about why he was asked to deliver this stunningly sexy Chinese girl in the first place, but it soon becomes clear that her family is involved in a massive smuggling operation involving smuggling bedraggled Chinese people out of China. Incidentally, I watched the movie last night in China with a bunch of my Chinese friends. They were not amused.
The rest of the movie, unfortunately, is an exercise in Action Movie-making 101. It's flooded with action clichés and predictability, which is disappointing even though there wasn't really a time in the first half of the movie where it promised to be anything different.
But the bigger problem than the clichés and the predictability are the sheer lack of thought put into the script and the senselessness of the entire premise itself. You see, the Chinese girl's father is currently smuggling "400 people in a container" through Marseilles. Is this for real? 400 people in a container the size of a semi trailer? Shipping through Marseilles? I had been under the impression that a container traveling from Hong Kong to, say, America takes something like 4-6 weeks. But to travel "through" Marseilles on its way to somewhere else? Such a trip would take months and I'm just going to go ahead and guess that roughly 0% of the cargo would make it through alive. I don't know much about the logistics of human smuggling, but I'm guessing that such a percentage would do some damage to your profit margins.
But no matter. The evil criminal scheme behind the action is beside the point, it's little more than a catalyst to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys and give them something to fight over. Jason Statham is cool as hell in the movie, but his costar may be a good Chinese actress (she's much more famous here than she is in America, so's you know), but she just can't act in English. She reminded me of the horrendous performance by the heroine in First Blood Part II.
At the time of this writing I've seen half of The Transporter II, which immediately comes off as a much better movie than the original, which places it in the diminutive category of sequels that surpass their original movies. Statham fans and hardcore action fans may get a kick out of The Transporter, but behind the high class action gloss and Statham's star power it's a b-movie at heart.