The Transporter

< Previous Trailer  |   Add to My Scrapbook  |   Next Trailer >
The Transporter

78% Liked It
liked it

The Transporter

François Berléand, Jason Statham, Matt Schulze, Qi Shu

This film is about a man (Statham) whose job is to deliver packages without asking any questions. Complications arise when he breaks those rules.

Id: 10896051

Do you want to see this movie?

My Friends Said...

The Transporter Recent Reviews

Register or sign-in to see your friends' reviews !

Recent Reviews

The Transporter Recent Reviews
  • SirPant
    September 14, 2009
    SirPant
    Not bad at all but I wish Besson would stop Producing so much and start directing again!
  • EarthlyAlien
    June 18, 2009
    EarthlyAlien
    "Transportation is a precise business."

    When The Transporter first came out, in 2002, I was fifteen. Seems impossible, but that was seven years ago. And now that I think about it, I guess what the Film-world really needed back then was a white action hero who could...( read more) kick some serious ass. Or so the Hollywood powers seemed to think, anyway. Sure, it's crass and weird and at least a little troubling to view things that way, but you can't deny there was a vacancy in the category. Arnie and Sly were almost ready to collect Medicare. Keanu Reeves was content to meditate and make Matrix sequels. Bruce Willis was becoming an actor who was "good with kids." Chuck Norris was always a born infomercial pitchman, even at the height of his fame. Steven Seagal was a Buddhist embroiled in lawsuits. And Matt Damon and Daniel Craig were still taking baby steps towards action stardom.

    Photobucket

    Of course there was Vin Diesel, whose hotness and coolness couldn't be ignored among ladies and gentlemen. Diesel had clearly established himself as a franchise after XxX, The Fast and the Furious and Pitch Black. But there was only one of him, he's racially ambiguous in a way that gets a lot of people's motors running (and may alienate others) and his acting style always makes you think he's basically kidding about the whole thing. All this may go some distance toward explaining how Jason Statham, an English actor most Americans had never heard of, got his name above the title in The Transporter.

    A former Olympic diver with a martial-arts background, Statham offered a sort of limey-Zen version of Diesel's Brooklyn-by-way-of-SoCal swagger. He's got the shaved head and the impressively cut physique. He wears nice suits well, despite the impression he gives of being an East End 'ard man ready to bust heads at a football match. Best of all, from a filmmaker's point of view, Statham has a certain stillness or inward-looking grace that translates into unmistakable screen charisma. You know what I mean: He's a Clint Eastwood man who lives by his own rules and thinks before he acts, but when he acts, whoo-boy.

    Statham was selected for stardom, not experience (his first acting role had been only four years prior, in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock) by Luc Besson, who is clearly the brains behind the Transporter franchise, even though he direct none. It's a frankly commercial package film of the sort at which Besson excels: a fresh star who undoubtedly worked hard for a relatively low price, a director (Hong Kong legend Corey Yuen) making his English-language debut and Besson's beloved south of France scenery. There's even a little scuba-diving scene that Besson, an underwater-photography junkie, shot himself.

    There's plenty to like here, especially for connoisseurs of the action genre, and there's also plenty to make you wonder whether Besson and his long-time co-writer Robert Mark Kamen scribbled their screenplay on a batch of Marseilles cocktail napkins and then lost one or two. Statham is an agreeable if cryptic presence as Frank Martin, an ex-military type turned non-violent criminal whose speciality is delivering people and packages to places in his souped-up BMW without asking questions.

    One of his packages turns out to be a woman named Lai (Shu Qi, a gorgeous Taiwan-born star of the Chinese-film world) in a burlap sack. Frank is of course a decent chap at heart, so he breaks his own rules by letting Lai out for a drink of water and a pee. On the other hand, he believes in honour among thugs, so he delivers her as scheduled to a seedy-looking American expat (Matthew Schulze, in a highly enjoyable performance) who seems to have inherited some of Brad Pitt's leftover mack-daddy threads from Fight Club.

    Photobucket

    That's about as far as I can take you with plot. Not because there's something to give away, but just because it doesn't make any sense after that. The slimy Brad Pitt-looking guy tries to blow Frank up for uncertain reasons, and all heck breaks loose. Lai convinces Frank to take her in, despite the fact that she's the source of all his problems. She's cute as a button, and seductive when she wants to be, as Frank discovers. Then somebody destroys Frank's lovely Mediterranean villa with surface-to-air missiles. Besson, Yuen and company seem to be striving for a screwball-comedy tone here that doesn't work at all, partly because neither of the leads talks much. Statham can't seem to decide whether to try for an American accent or stick with his own, and the lovely Shu Qi basically doesn't speak English.

    Lai tells Frank that her family and a bunch of other Chinese immigrants are being smuggled into France to be sold as forced labour. This isn't true, because her father (Ric Young) shows up in one highly confusing scene and seems to be a bad guy in league with the Schulze character. To do what, I'm not sure: smuggle human beings or control French trucking routes or fix Internet airline pricing.

    The truth is The Transporter is a much better action film than 80% of the stuff that Hollywood has produced in the last secen years, but you still can't figure out what's supposed to be happening. Yuen has a nice eye, though; aided by his cinematographer Pierre Morel, a former Besson protégé, he delivers an unconventional view of the south of France as not just a deluxe beach party but also an industrial zone of highways, loading docks and fluorescent-lit depots.

    Yuen, who has directed several Jet Li flicks, including The Enforcer and the two Legend films, helps a lot evoking the heyday of HK action film, supplying an outstanding car chase through the streets of Marseilles at the very beginning, and much of the rest of the film consists of the action set-pieces he specializes in. We get Frank as, quite literally, the guy without a hatchet in a hatchet fight. We get him, in the film's coolest scene, tangling with a pack of bad guys on the floor of a bus garage soaked with fresh oil, so nobody can stand up for more than a second (until Frank gets a pair of those mechanic's cleats on his feet, that is). We get him sledding down a mountain highway on the severed cab door of a semi-truck.

    If Statham isn't quite the equal of Li, or of Yuen's former colleagues Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, he's an able physical performer who seems to do most of his own stunt work. Would he click with the masses? We now know he did, he went on to become a superstar, but it was The Transporter that made that happen. Shu Qi, whose work stretches from Hong Kong action-erotica to Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien's work, is largely squandered here as eye candy, which was expected. But François Berléand, a veteran of French stage and screen, is terrific as the phlegmatic cop who becomes Frank's pursuer and then his accomplice, bringing a touch of Casablanca elegance to what is, at heart, slick, reckless entertainment at its finest.
  • JohnSilver
    May 20, 2009
    JohnSilver
    Dans ce premier volet on n'apprend à connaitre Frank le "transporter". On apprend sur son passé, sur sa vie, ses habitudes. Film avec de l'action, mais pas trop, beaucoup de temps mort. Les scènes de combat sont cependant excellentes. Les voix françaises me font ragé par contre ...
  • SilentScreamer
    April 24, 2009
    SilentScreamer
    1st one is always the best.
  • hobster1
    April 16, 2009
    hobster1
    Underworld courier-for-hire's life is complicated when he discovers his latest parcel is actually a beautiful Asian woman being sent to a nefarious American known only as Wall Street. Sturdy action film set in France has explosions, fast cars, an attractive girl and a captivatin...( read more)g action hero. The fight scenes are the best part about the film. It's a dependable, if not terribly coherent, potboiler.
  • The13xxx
    December 9, 2009
    The13xxx
    Once in a while there would be some brainless, cool action movie that comes around and The Transporter is it! Love the movie, watched it years back just get around the DVD. Jason Statham is the new Bruce Willis, he is damn awesome. As for the story not too shabby, they don't over...( read more) dramatized it.

    7/10.
  • karensully92
    December 6, 2009
    karensully92
    jason statham is my new action hero... i want 2 c de others now... it is totally tacky action but dats be best kind rite? hahahaha
  • builder23601
    November 29, 2009
    builder23601
    great compilation, even the ending song is one of my favorites
  • sashikaxp
    November 29, 2009
    sashikaxp
    A traditional action thriller theme but with a different concept. Although the start of the movie is coupled with an impressive novel concept, towards the middle and end, it becomes a generic rescue mission. But overall its good
  • lexy1905
    November 25, 2009
    lexy1905
    Beeeeeeeeeeee.......................
View All Reviews

Opening This Week

Top Box Office

Upcoming Movies

New on DVD