Transporter 3 (*)

Directed by: Olivier Megaton
Starring: Jason Statham, Robert Knepper, Natalya Rudakova
Seen: January 24th 2009

* Out of ****

Olivier Megaton is yet another action director from the Luc Besson school/mould. This saddens me, since Besson’s reputation is getting slightly tarnished over the years, since he made The Fifth Element, probably the single film I’ve seen the most times ever, one of my unequivocal favourites, and The Professional too, another personal favourite. I would like to not give the minimum rating here for the pure and simple reason that some of it looks really good, but the effort still goes down in flames.

Frank Martin (Statham) is back, and yes, this time he has to break his rules, because the villain is one really bad guy, Johnson (Knepper), and he manages to change Frank’s outlook a bit. Once again he is approached to deliver a package, but this time we see he didn’t initially accept, he only did so after the first hired driver was killed. Driving with him is the strangely attractive, red-headed, heavily freckled Valentina, a Ukranian that gives Frank quite a bit of trouble. She is, however, just another actress merely playing a rebellious teenager type, nothing more.

This time there is no specific location to take “the package”, he just keeps receiving a new GPS location every now and then to drive to. And of course someone will try to double cross him, where will the car chases come from otherwise? The car chases are very well done, and once again realism takes an absolute backseat. Every one who has seen the trailer knows that Frank at some point drives his car into a lake. And at another he drives it off a bridge onto the roof of a train. And I bet you can guess which comes first in the timeline. Yes, it’s the lake-dive…

The car chases are very well choreographed, and it looks like they are moving really fast at times, but then you can sometimes see that this is film played forward quicker to make the cars look faster. I also do not believe any regular production Mercedes (the one here is not marked as being an SL55 or such) can stay with, or even overtake an Audi S8, ever. The fight scenes are the old-school kind – ten villains dancing around the good guy taking him on one at a time, only sometimes two, and yes, the lose badly.

This all is the main story, but I strongly believe after writing this the filmmakers had about 40 minutes of film, which, of course, they needed to flesh out. And how did they do that, you may ask? One extremely corny, slightly unfitting “love scene” on the mountain as the sun sets, that’s ten minutes. Book-ending the film between two relatively irrelevant fishing trips, another ten minutes. And the rest of the time is made up while driving, with recipes. I kid you not, recipes, as in food recipes. The two can’t stop talking about their favourite dishes at the restaurants of whichever European town/city they are close to, and it got on the nerves of me and everyone watching the film with me. Recipes in an action movie, one is fine, two might be OK, but this is ridiculous.