Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Don't Look In The Package| Jason Statham makes the rules in Transporter 3.

Transporter 3

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TRANSPORTER 3
Directed by Olivier Megaton. Starring Jason Statham, Robert Knepper, Natalya Rudakova, François Berléand. Now playing.
***

It’s worth noting that while the promotional poster for Transporter 3 shows Jason Statham flying through the air with guns in hand, in the movie he rarely uses any weapons other than his fists. But that’s okay because Statham, reprising his role as chauffeur extraordinaire Frank Martin, is pretty much expected to be a total badass who can win a fight without breaking a sweat.

Director Olivier Megaton knows that at this point in the Transporter franchise, people come in wanting to see two things: an expensive Audi being driven at very high speeds and Jason Statham beating the snot out of mindless henchmen. Meeting such humble expectations is not as easy as it sounds, however, and the most convenient thing for the film to do would be to focus entirely on action and completely ignore any semblance of plot.

But Transporter 3 does have a plot, albeit an extremely simple one: a mysterious girl named Valentina (Natalya Rudakova) is taken hostage by a man known only as Mr. Johnson (Robert Knepper), and Frank Martin is forcefully hired to escort her from Marseilles to Odessa. The only added levels of complexity are that goons not working for Johnson are chasing Martin and Valentina, and a sinister group of executives is seeking to somehow damage the environment — it’s never explained why. Little time is wasted trying to get the viewer invested in the characters because all we need to know is that Frank Martin is a dangerously competent driver and Valentina has a sexy accent.

It must be said that the film has a sense of humour too, most of it supplied by Martin’s detective friend Tarconi (François Berléand). His often rambling, intentionally irrelevant dialogue makes for a few genuine laughs that wouldn’t be out of place in a middle of the road comedy. One cannot discount the fact that the script is co-written by one-man action-movie factory Luc Besson, who’s perhaps best known in North America for The Fifth Element, but who’s directed, co-written, and produced literally dozens of stylish films, from The Professional to Ong-Bak, and who is adept at finding moments of enjoyable silliness within otherwise adrenaline-fueled action setpieces. He probably wants you to laugh when Frank Martin finds it necessary to chase a car with a BMX bike and grind a handrail in the process, just as he is surely aware of the absurdity of using a flashback sequence as an excuse to shoehorn in yet another fight scene.

There is, inevitably, some romance between Statham and Rudakova, although it seems to have been included merely so that Statham can take his shirt off in a scene that doesn’t involve fighting (In case you’re wondering, he works out.) Their chemistry is forced, but realistic male-female relationships have never been the hallmark of the action genre, especially ones created by Luc Besson. At first I was inclined to criticize the moment the two share after they have sex and cuddle on the edge of a cliff, but then I realized that the typical Statham fan probably believes that’s exactly what connecting emotionally with a woman is like. After all, a real man is dangerous and sensitive.

So many things could have gone wrong with Transporter 3, but the only real disappointment is that the stuntwork doesn’t go even more overboard. Even if this movie is only a placeholder allowing for a fourth instalment, the series still feels relatively crisp — and how many sequels can claim that?