The Transporter
- Alex
So the other night at dinner my friend Will offered up this review of The Transporter, having only seen the previews and TV commercials
for it:
"Some dude transports stuff all over the place and one day he opens the trunk
and it's some hot chick so he bangs her and then kicks a door down and
deflects a missle out the window with a metal tray."
I'd love tell you that there's more to this movie than that. I'd really love to. But there's not. Pity, too, because this film had the
potential to be every bit as interesting as The Bourne Identity, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Jason Statham does his best as action hero "Frank".
Statham delivers his lines with a dry wit, and some great facial expressions to go with it. You believe him, and like him. Sadly, the movie and
supporting actors surrounding him are lackluster at best. I'm not even going to bother looking up their names, we'll just go with rough character
approximations. The girl he finds in his trunk is boring, has a boatload of bad lines, and wasn't all that attractive to me. The French Cop who
you're left wondering who's side he's on until the end had potential... unfortunately I needed the Andre The Giant memorial translator for him -
I couldn't understand a damn word the guy said. The two bad guys... one was white, one was asian... they were taken from stock footage, I'm
convinced, and spliced in. No one can act that bad in a movie they're actually in. The only thing I could find to say positively about the two
of them was that the white guy was in Blade II.
Well at least Statham was decent...
As an editorial aside, I don't feel like I'm asking for too much out of an action movie to provide me with SOMETHING more than just explosions.
Make the villains interesting, make the dialogue clever, make someone, ANYONE, funny... just one of those three things would have saved this
movie. The action sequences were pretty good. Statham played his role solidly. It's just that everything else sucked. I wanted to like this
movie, it just wouldn't let me. Too bad for it. On to the rating:
Since I've been away for a while from SP.com, some of you may have forgotten the Trent Scale of movie ranking. Essentially, the more Trents I
give, the worse the movie is. Movies in the Trent Scale Hall of Fame include: Dracula 2000 (5 Trents, current king of the Trent Mountain - a
movie with absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever), Vertical Limit (4 - 4.5 Trents, at least there was an interesting female actress and some
good mountain scenery), and XXX (4 Trents, the worst dialogue I've ever heard in an action movie).
I'll give The Transporter a bit of credit for Statham's performance, and because the rest of the movie didn't actively detract from that...
but not much credit.
Three and a half Trents
The bottom line is, Will's right. If you've seen the dude deflect the missle with a metal tray on TV, you've seen the movie. I'm out.
10/27/02
