Transporter 3

Year: 2008
Director: Olivier Megaton
Cast: Jason Statham, Natalya Rudakova, Francois Berleand, Robert Knepper

I didn't think The Transporter was good enough to come up with yet another sequel. Don't get me wrong, I loved the first one. Good action sequences and some funny dialogue made it fun to watch. The second was all right, but a little over the top. And I had thought Jason Statham wouldn't want to play this role yet again, despite being so good at it. Like Jet Li, action roles are all Statham will be remembered for, but certainly he wouldn't want to be stuck doing Frank Martin again and again, or would he?

Anyway, the third Transporter film begins when a friend of Frank's crashes his car through Frank's house, nearly dead and a girl in the back seat. Apparently his friend screwed up a transport job Frank had turned down earlier, and now he has paid for it dearly. Suddenly Frank gets knocked out, and he wakes up with a metal bracelet cuffed to his wrist. It's a device that is programmed to explode if he moves more than 75 feet from his car.

A man named Johnson wants Frank to carry the girl across Europe in his car, or he dies. Frank reluctantly agrees and proceeds with the task at hand. The girl, Valentina is not cooperative in filling in the blanks, so Frank calls to his friend, Inspector Tarconi for help. We learn then that Valentina is the daughter of the Internal Minister of Ukraine, who is being blackmailed by Johnson to allow a corporation to dump toxic waste in his country, in exchange for his daughter's life.

Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen return to write this sequel, with Olivier Megaton as director. Corey Yuen also returns as action director, and as a result we get some decent hand to hand combat sequences. Watch how Frank fights ten guys in a garage, using his appendages, clothes and garage tools. Cool stuff. Throw in a car chase, a bicycle stunt sequence and a car stunt atop a train, and we should have a good action flick. Right? Wrong.

The lead female character Valentina is one annoying bitch. I'm sure it's not Natalya Rudakova's fault, but the writers who made her seem cold one minute, then high the next, then petty and childish later on. Besson and Kamen try to make her a romantic foil for Frank, but it just doesn't work. Shu Qi wasn't a great damsel in the first film, but she's so much more watchable. Then there's the dialogue, which come off as boring and tiresome, leaving us itching for more of the action scenes instead. And the fact that Frank's three rules are suspended this time around takes the fun out of the film.

But at least Statham doesn't disappoint in the role that made him famous. Robert Knepper, whom you'll all know as the villain in TV series Prison Break, brings his slimy performance from TV to film well as Johnson. Francois Berleand once again comes onboard as Inspector Tarconi, and provides the humour for an otherwise dull affair.

It is just average entertainment this time around, and miles behind the first Transporter film. (3/5)