The Transporter (15)

Starring: Jason Stathem, Qi Shu, Matt Schulze, Ric Young 

There’s a certain type of film that isn’t designed to win awards or play off the popularity of celebrities, but just to provide an hour and a half or so of high impact escapism. The Transporter is most definitely one of these, and wouldn‘t be anywhere near as entertaining if it attempted to be anything else. Anyone who enjoyed the Taxi films, also by Luc Besson, will definitely get on with this one.

Former Special Forces agent Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is a delivery driver whose specialty is getting packages from one place to another with no questions asked. He believes strongly in three rules and insists that all clients observe them - the deal is the deal and cannot be changed, no names, and never look inside the package. Martin takes on a typical carriage contract, but during a stop to change a tyre notices that something is not quite right with the package he’s been paid to carry. He decides to break rule three and looks inside, and from then on a simple delivery run becomes a path to something far bigger and more dangerous.

The Transporter seems to borrow quite heavily from Ronin in the early scenes, as we’re treated to Martin helping a group of bank robbers to escape to the outskirts by taking a high speed route through the backstreets of a French town in a high powered saloon car. The driving is superb as you’d expect from any worthwhile action film, although it does include a couple of completely unbelievable stunts – the leap from a standing start on a bridge into a gap on the top deck of a car transporter is particularly cringeworthy – so it’s best to just accept them and enjoy the rest. The sharp eyed among you will notice that Martin’s car of choice – a BMW 7 series – is a rarity because it was built with a manual gearbox just for that film, but regardless of the subtleties it becomes the star for those few minutes.

Outside of the road action Statham’s specialty is the fight scene, and with Cory Yuen as the assistant director and stunt planner you can rightly expect a lot of those. The choreography is extremely good, if suffering from the ‘group of guys who only seem capable of attacking one at a time’ syndrome, and there’s a particularly imaginative scene involving a garage floor, a few gallons of motor oil, and some bike pedals (don’t ask).

As you might expect, the plot and acting definitely take a back seat to the action. Statham plays the cool and collected Martin extremely well, coming across like a cross between Jet Li and Agent 47 from the Hitman games, but some of the other actors are best described as functional – Ric Young (Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story) is particularly bad and for some reason appears to be made of plastic. There’s also an interesting (if stereotyped) appearance by Matt Schulze (Fast and the Furious, Torque) as a psychotic people trafficker and Francois Berleand is entertaining in an Inspector Clouseau kind of way. Special marks go to lead actress Shu Qi for recording the film whilst barely knowing a word of English.

If you like fast, loud and exciting then the Transporter will definitely appeal. Approach it on those terms and be prepared to overlook the more iffy details and it’s a blast.