I’ve watched a lot of bad Kung-Fu movies since I was young. There is just something undeniably satisfying about watching one grown man punch another in the genitals that some people just don’t understand. An interesting thing about the older kung fu movies with actors like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan is how timeless they are. “Enter the Dragon” is over 30 years old now and it’s still far more entertaining than “Transporter 3.”
To me the Transporter series has always been rather average, but it always gets a few points up because of Jason Statham. Statham in this movie reprises his role as the extremely professional Frank Martin, who makes his living by transporting packages illegally throughout Europe. What makes Martin different from any other normal truck driver is that he uses an Audi, prominently mentioned at least several times per movie, and tends to drive a bit faster.
This movie’s special twist is that Martin is wired up to explode through a bracelet that will go off if he moves more than 50 feet from the car. Also wired to explode is the love interest of the story Valentina Vasilev, played by Natalya Rudakova, who is the kidnapped daughter of a surprisingly clean Ukrainian interior minister. Vasilev has been kidnapped because an American corporation is trying to dump waste in Ukraine and the corporation needs a little extralegal pressure. So they hire Johnson, played by Robert Knepper, who subcontracts out to Martin to take her for a ride.
One of the plus sides of the movie is that it really does take the audience along with it. Once the plot takes a twist you can see how it will go, but you can’t see the whole road it will take you down. The bumps in the road come whenever Vasilev opens her mouth, every time she spoke, I laughed out loud because of the cheesy lines. They went on forever about some kind of cooked fish, which made me laugh more than bored me.
Of course the bread and butter of the movie are the action sequences, which left me starved. I found the action scenes in the movie to be few and far between. Even when they were duking it out there was nothing really impressive. The camera was shaking so much in the fight scenes that I couldn’t tell what was happening half of the time. It was like every time Martin did a punch they focused on his fist, then went back to his face, then the other guys face, then his fist, then to a donut on the floor, and then back to Martin’s face. These kinds of camera angles kill action movies, and make them overly complicated. Why not just show Statham punching the dude? Oh wait, did Statham do his own stunts…..?
Furthermore, why is Martin punching some guys, slapping others, and killing the rest? He has this problem with force in the movie, the big guy that Martin punches several times and can’t hurt gets hit with a shovel in the head, and while that may seem harsh, to the two guys who just happened to be in the same room as him Martin drops a car on them.
Honestly though if anyone could pull this movie off, it’s Statham. He actually can act, and proves it by playing the tough guy, but in a realistic and brusque way. His character is consistent through the whole movie, and I would call him the Jackie Chan to a Bruce Lee. The Bruce Lee of the modern era is of course Tony Jaa.
“Transporter 3” has all of the hallmarks of the old movies, but doesn’t add anything new or even that interesting. Gratuitous violence to random thugs, the ripping off of the protagonists shirt, a couple of ‘nut-shots’, and cringe worthy dialogue, but since these types of movies are made for the spectacles then I would definitely recommend checking out a movie like “The Protector” instead.
