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The Transporter
**
Cinema
Reviews - Week of January 17, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15.
USA/France. 92 minutes. Directed Corey Yuen. Written by Luc Besson, Robert
Mark Kamen. Starring Jason Statham, Qi Shu, Matt Schulze, Francois Berleand,
Ric Young, Doug Rand, Didier Saint Melin, Laurent Desponds, Matthieu
Albertini.
My homeboy Tony Murphy has a thing about Jason
Statham. He thinks that the man is unjustly unrecognised as one of the worst
screen actors alive. He once put together a collage of the guy's facial
expressions, just to prove the point. Statham was trying to look tough, but
in the best pictures he appeared confused and in the worst like he was straining
for a dump. Tony had a point.
It's hard to recall Statham doing anything wrong
in "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" or "Snatch", but in those films
he was playing low-rent Cockney hoods, and that was appropriate for a Brit
who looks like he could kick some ass. Then he appeared in "The One", as
a meathead Los Angeles cop with such lines as, "With all due respect, sir,
that's bullshit!" He frowned excessively and strived to put on looks of
concentration and toughness, and he talked in one of those laughably gravely
action-movie accents that sound like impressions of the guy who does voice-overs
for scary trailers.
When I first saw clips for "The
Transporter", I could not believe my eyes and ears. Here was poor
Jason, in the leading role of a major action movie, performing pretty much
how he did in "The One". Again with the embarrassingly retarded frowning
and grimacing, and an accent that I think is supposed to be an attempt at
hard-ass American but sometimes just lapses into unhidden British. This was
going to be the gigglefest of the year.
Sure enough, for most of the time, "The Transporter"
sees Statham attempt to act mean in ways that beg for a laughter track. But
-- and I can sense Tony raising his eyebrow at me -- there are moments when
we see the guy's promise. He carries himself properly. His body language
is interesting. If he didn't try so hard, if he took it down a notch, if
he used his own damn voice, he could be a credible star. I've seen him in
interviews, where he seems like a good bloke, humbled and grateful that his
career is taking off. My guess is that he's open to advice. He should take
mine, and live up to his potential, before he becomes a joke.
The movie sees him play an ex-military strongman
now living in a French villa, whose upkeep is paid for by his job as a courier
and getaway driver for wealthy European criminals. Why these gangsters can't
use their own cars, I have no idea. But Statham is good at what he does;
he keeps himself free of attachments, tries not to say more than the necessary,
and has a few rules he never breaks: 1) Never change the deal; 2) No names;
3) Never look in the package.
Any movie about rules will soon see them broken,
and the plot kicks off when Statham goes ahead and opens one of his packages,
because it's wriggling around in the boot of his car. Inside is a beautiful
young woman (Qi Shu), who breaks Statham's shell, wins his heart, and convinces
him to help her free a shipment of slaves that are being brought in from
China by her evil industrialist father. All this mess, of course, is a shoestring
for a whole bunch of action sequences, involving machine guns, big vehicles
and speedy martial arts.
The film is trash, but it's about as watchable
as it can be, given the fundamental flaws of the Statham performance, the
lack of intentional humour, and the fact that this is a Luc Besson production.
Besson used to make interesting stuff like "The Big Blue" and "Leon", but
now he's involved in action pictures that are a curious balance between
blockbuster slickness and straight-to-video cheese. They have tricky camerawork
and expansive fight sequences, and they manage to get wide releases all over
the world, yet their photography looks just a little too dark to have been
properly exposed, and little things like their credits sequences tend to
edge on the tacky side.
In "The Transporter", we do at least get two terrific
set pieces. There's an extraordinary opening car chase, where Statham manages
to dodge through traffic and exhilaratingly zip down tiny streets while being
pursued by every cop car available. Later, he finds himself fighting a crew
of bad guys in the middle of a crude oil spill, and the scene is ridiculous
but nonetheless inventive for the way our hero uses the tricky liquid to
his advantage while everyone else slips around. The rest of the action is
reasonable claptrap that almost gets boring but not quite. I do like the
way the movie uses kung-fu; unlike Jet Li's recent films, which ignore his
talent and instead plug him into the middle of special effects, this one
actually shows men using their bodies to fight.
And this is about all that's fit to print. "The
Transporter" is a mostly forgettable bunch of silly stunts, which is how
Besson likes it these days, because it seems to be making him money. As for
Statham, he's being half-heartedly advertised as the new Bruce Willis, and
nobody is going to buy it. When he's good, yes, he's seriously good. When
he isn't... well, at least it's entertaining.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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