Transporter 3
There’s
really something to be said for guys like The Transporter. Action heroes like this come along once in a
fortnight and I really appreciate them when they do. Guys who have no personal connection to the
events around them and who in no way develop over the course of the movie and
accomplish nothing other than restoring the status quo. I realize I probably sound like a fool to be
praising a film series for not attempting to tell meaningful stories but
there’s really an art to this shit that must be discussed.
It sounds easy
to just think up a clusterfuckarianesque-ish
situation involving crime rings or terrorists and to just drop a perfect asskicker in the middle and let him sort it out. But to pull it off three times is
tricky. There’s always this temptation
to want to explain the hero, to make the conflict about him, to have him learn
something or gain something. It’s hard
to make a series of truly standalone episodic entries of moronic action movies.
I think we all
knew that after Riggs killed the gangsters who had killed his wife in Lethal
Weapon 2 that any sequels after that just weren’t going to have the same
punch. Indiana Jones seemed ideally
setup to deliver endless standalone sequels with the simple formula of artefact
+ exotic local + action sequences = good times.
But Indy only got one good brainless sequel out before he started having
father figure issues and these days he’s a deadbeat dad. They even explained why he was afraid of
snakes like that was some really uncommon fear and we needed to know all this
shit that de-mythologized him.
James Bond had
the longest run as a brainless action movie guy, but these days even he has
become this mopey pouter who broods about being an
orphan and losing his banker girlfriend in a failed home remodelling venture in
Italy. And almost every other action
movie series out there is a sob story.
As much as I like Bourne, Batman, and Rambo, I also
occasionally like going to an action movie that doesn’t remind me of an AA
meeting. And that’s where The
Transporter comes in.
None of the
shit in these movies is about his dad or his childhood or even really treated
like anything out of the ordinary for him.
Getting caught in the middle of a human slave ship ring for him is like
getting stuck in traffic for the rest of us.
I’d heard rumblings that this would be the final entry in the series, I
guess Luc Besson didn’t get the Alien-Lethal
Weapon-Die Hard-Indiana Jones memo that trilogies now have four films. But it got me worried that they’d try to resolve
some of this shit permanently, which if you’ve seen Indiana Jones 3: The
Last Crusade, you know that just means fucking with the conventions of the
first two movies and kinda ruining the character so
that nobody wants to touch him for another decade until nostalgia for the
series starts to hit.
But they dodged
it! There is nothing in Transporter 3
that could prevent a Transporter 4 from being made tomorrow or just
jumping right to Transporter 7 and eventually going back filling the
blanks. Nothing happens in Transporter
3 that changes anything in any way so that somebody who skipped seeing this
entry and then saw Transporter 4 would be asking “What happened to
his legs?” or “So these movies don’t have cars now?”
It’s just more
of the same, and thank heavens. The film features plenty of good Transporter
material: car stunts, The Transporter beating a big man into smallitude, more car stunts. At one point Transporter has to chase his own
car and they play the song ‘Now I Wanna Be Your Dog’
to show he’s like a dog chasing cars, however unlike The Joker, he knows what
to do with one when he catches it.
The highlight
being a striptease fight during which the Transporter strips using each article
of his clothing as a weapon to take on a crowd of villains and when he runs out
of his own clothes he starts ripping the baddies’ belts off and whipping them
with them. I always thought the most
humiliating way to be beaten is for a guy to grab your arm and manipulate you into
punching yourself, but getting defeated with your own clothes? That’s insult to injury to insult to your
pants falling down. The only thing I can
think of that would be worse is having the change kicked out of my pockets
which is then used to buy snacks from a vending machine which the Transporter
whips at me and then tilts the vending machine over on top of my Frito-covered
body. I give Luc Besson
this idea for free.
As you know
these movies fetishize automobiles. But this one takes it to a new level. There’s one part where the bad guy refers to
Transporter’s car as the source of his life and a fitting coffin in which to
end it, but then the metaphor goes full blown literal when Transporter starts
nursing on the car’s nipples to sustain his life. That was like something out of The Fountain.
Like usual, the
film features the same stuff we’ve seen in every Luc Besson
movie. There’s his typical portrayal of
men as disciplined sourpuss professionals and women as playful child-like
sprites who just like to stir things up.
You get your standard Besson overwrought
sentimentality, this time involving corny piano music while the characters
describe their ideal meals. You’ve got
your typical Bessonian monologues about
professionalism and methods and discipline.
Besson does his usual in writing really
stereotypical one-dimensional villains, since Besson
isn’t directing you don’t get the benefit of these villain characters being
elevated by Gary Oldman’s acting.
The bad guy in
this called Johnson and is played by Robert Knepper,
an actor with a long career on television shows that I haven’t seen. He kinda looks and
seems like Stephen Colbert’s asshole terrorist brother. He gets two action movie villain manoeuvres
out the way in one scene. He does the
thing where you coldly shoot one of your own guys for doubting you, and then
turns around and does the typical villain speech to the hero about how they’re
not that different. I’d like to see just
once for the hero to respond with “Yeah, you’re right, we’re both
professionals, we’re both good at what we do, we both have codes of honour, I
guess we are pretty similar. Sure.”
Then at the end
he gets the other villain clichés out of the way. He does the whole speech to somebody he’s
victimizes about how he just believes in ‘progress’ or some bullshit. I like that the hostage flips him the bird,
he sits down, regroups his thoughts, and gets up and takes a second go at
rationalizing his terrorism aloud. I
guess he underestimated how long it takes Stockholm syndrome to sink in.
You even get
the moment where the hero beats his way to the main villain and the villain
offers him a job like the hero’s going to find that flattering and jump at a
dental plan or something. But there’s a
weird dialogue exchange that goes something like this:
“Most impressive! I’d like to offer you a position in my organization.”
“I’ve got a
position for you: permanently disabled!”
[beating]
I think Luc Besson writes his scripts in French and has them
translated, but I can’t figure out which play on words in French he would’ve
been trying to do here. We all know
‘disabled’ is not a position, so maybe it’s the witlessness of it that’s
supposed to be funny, but I feel like something got lost between two languages
here. Maybe the bad guy was supposed to
say something about having a ‘spot’ for Transporter and the retort was “I’ll
put you in the handicapped spot.” In
which case I feel kidnappers and terrorists should not get the same parking
privileges as people who lost the use of their limbs in legal situations.
If I had any
problems with this movie they would be pretty minor, but there’s two of them:
the beginning and the end. The first two
Transporter films opened brilliantly with those scenes of Transporter in
the parking garage powering up his vehicle and putting on his gloves, the
second film flipped it cleverly by having muggers throw off his
smoothness. This one just opens like
every action movie with all this pointless exposition of how deadly the
chemicals we’re dealing with are and a bunch of stuff with Ukrainian
politicians. Stuff that all gets covered
again throughout the movie. The draw of
these movies is the character and Statham’s portrayal of him, but it’s several minutes of boring plot shit before Statham
shows up and when he does, it’s clear the movie should’ve started with
him. I think the film should’ve started
with the scene where one of his subcontracting transporters comes crashing
through his den wall while he’s watching television. That was great. All that shit with guys getting their faces
melted off by chemicals and political guys panicking can stay in Michael
Bay’s The Rock.
As for the
ending, I think the climax was good, but it was one martial arts beatdown away from great.
I loved the stuff with Transporter parking his car on the roof of a
moving train and having to re-park it inside the train to avoid a ticket. We’ve all been there. Fucking tow-away zones. But once he got on the train I feel he needed
to fistfight all those henchmen who were on there. That fight opportunity was sadly skipped.
I think I
preferred how the second film stacked all its best action sequences in a row at
the end of the film. This one is more
like the first one in that the best action is scattered around the middle. But I’m satisfied with this instalment and
look forward to a fourth through tenth instalment at which point we’ll
re-evaluate.
If you liked this, here are some other
recommended writings:
This film is a pleasant
magazine in the waiting room for Transporter
3.
There’s only one way
out….of The Cage!
Here’s this car chase
movie I wrote since I don’t get to see King
of the Mountain.