Transporter 3 Film

[Armanda Kicks]

TheTransporter (French: Le Transporteur) is a 2002 English-language French action film directed by Louis Leterrier[b] from a screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. The film, which was inspired by the short film series The Hire, is the first installment in the Transporter franchise and stars Jason Statham, alongside Shu Qi, Franois Berland, Matt Schulze, and Ric Young. In the film, Frank Martin, a British mercenary driver living in France, finds himself involved in a human trafficking plot.

In Nice, Frank is hired as the getaway driver for three bank robbers, but they have brought a fourth man. Explaining that the extra weight will affect his precisely planned escape, Frank refuses to drive until, in desperation, the leader kills and abandons one of his men. After evading police in a high-speed chase, the leader offers Frank more money to drive them to Avignon, but he refuses; the robbers flee in another car, but are foiled by their amateur driving. At Frank's villa on the French Riviera, local Police Inspector Tarconi questions him about his black BMW 735i, seen at the scene of the robbery, but Frank has carefully disposed of all evidence.

Frank is hired to deliver a 50 kilograms (110 lb) package to Darren "Wall Street" Bettencourt. While changing a flat tire, Frank realizes the package contains a person; he violates his third rule in order to give the captive something to drink, and discovers a woman bound and gagged. She attempts to escape, but Frank recaptures her and is forced to subdue two policemen who spot them. Frank delivers her to Wall Street as promised, and is given a briefcase to transport. As Frank stops to buy drinks for the cops in his trunk, a bomb in the briefcase explodes.

A vengeful Frank returns to Wall Street's villa, killing several henchmen and stealing a Mercedes-Benz S-Klasse, only to find "the package" hiding in the back seat. He brings the young woman, Lai, to his home, where she discovers he is a decorated former special operations soldier. Wall Street visits one of his surviving men in hospital, killing him after discovering Frank is alive. Tarconi questions Frank about the bombing of his car, which Frank claims was stolen, and Lai supports his alibi by introducing herself as his girlfriend. Tarconi leaves, and Wall Street's men attack the house with missiles and automatic weapons, but Frank and Lai narrowly escape through an underwater passage to a nearby safe house where Lai seduces Frank.

Later, while being questioned at the police station by Tarconi, Lai accesses his computer to find information on Wall Street. She reveals that he is a human trafficker with 400 Chinese immigrants trapped in shipping containers, and Frank reluctantly agrees to help. They confront Wall Street at his office, where Lai's father, Mr. Kwai, is revealed to be his partner in crime. Tarconi arrives as Wall Street subdues Frank and accuses him of kidnapping Lai, and Frank is arrested.

Tarconi suggests Frank take matters into his own hands, posing as his hostage to allow him to escape police custody. Recovering a weapons stash from his boat at the harbour of Cassis, Frank tracks the criminals to the Marseille docks, where the containers full of people depart on trucks. Chased to a bus depot, Frank fights his way through the thugs in a motor oil-drenched melee before escaping into the water. He steals an old car and gives chase at dawn before it breaks down, then commandeers a small airplane and parachutes down to the highway.

After a lengthy fight on the moving trucks, Frank throws Wall Street onto the road to his death (in the American version, Wall Street is thrown out of the truck onto the highway), only to be held at gunpoint by Kwai. He marches Frank to the edge of a cliff, but Lai shoots her father to save Frank, as Tarconi and the police rescue the people from the containers.

The film was cut to receive a PG-13 rating in the United States, and this version was also released in the United Kingdom and several other countries. Japan and France received the uncut versions. Certain sequences of violence were either cut or toned down for the PG-13 cut. These include:

The uncut fight on the bus can be seen in the "Extended Fight Sequences" on the North American DVD, but with no sound. The Japanese region-free Blu-ray cut of this film has the original uncut French version of the film. It also has several special features and deleted scenes. However, it does not include the North American special feature of the uncut fight scenes (with no sound). The uncut version of Transporter 2 is also included in this special boxed set.

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 54% based on 128reviews, with an average rating of 5.6/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "The Transporter delivers the action at the expense of coherent storytelling."[8] At Metacritic, the film received a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 27 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[9] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[10]

Manohla Dargis, of the Los Angeles Times, complimented the action, saying, "[Statham] certainly seems equipped to develop into a mid-weight alternative to Vin Diesel. That's particularly true if he keeps working with director Corey Yuen, a Hong Kong action veteran whose talent for hand-to-hand mayhem is truly something to see."[11] Roger Ebert wrote, "Too much action brings the movie to a dead standstill."[12] Eric Harrison, of the Houston Chronicle, said, "It's junk with a capital J. The sooner you realize that, the more quickly you can settle down to enjoying it."[13]

Reviewing "Transporter" in 2002, I expressed doubt that some of the action sequences were possible. "Transporter 2" sidesteps my complaint by containing action scenes that are even more impossible. For example: Seeing the reflection of a bomb in a pool of liquid under his car, and knowing that the bad guys will not explode it while they're standing right next to it, the hero races the car out of a garage and up an incline, spinning the car neatly through the air, so that it makes one complete rotation and the bomb is pulled off by a hook on a crane, exploding harmlessly as the car lands safely. Uh, huh.

I could observe that this is preposterous, but the fact is, I laughed aloud. Other stunts and computer-generated effects, were equally impossible, as when Frank Martin (Jason Statham) flies a jet ski onto a highway and jumps from it into the back of a school bus. And when he uses a fire hose to immobilize a posse of killers. And when he escapes from a plane that has crashed into the ocean. And when he leads a police pursuit up the ramps of a parking garage and then crashes his car through a wall of the garage, and it flies a couple of hundred feet through the air to a safe landing.

Either "Transporter 2" is wall to wall with absurd action, or it's not a sequel to "Transporter." And in fact the sequel is a better film than the original, as if writer-producer Luc Besson had a clearer idea of what he wanted to do (and didn't want to do); the direction is by Louis Leterrier, whose "Unleashed," released only three months ago, had that savage chemistry between a gangster (Bob Hoskins) and a fighter (Jet Li) he had raised like a dog. That movie was also written and produced by Luc Besson, who is the hardest-working man in show business. Look him up on IMDb.com if you want to feel tired just reading about his plans.

"Transporter 2" is better for a number of reasons, one of them that is has an ingenious plot that continues to reveal surprises and complications well into the third act; this is not simply a movie where the good guy chases the bad guys, but a movie where the story turns a lot trickier than we expected. It begins with Frank Martin helping out a friend by filling in for a month as the driver and bodyguard for a cute kid named Jack (Hunter Clary), whose dad Jackson (Matthew Modine) heads the United States narcotics agency. The kid is kidnapped in a bizarre scheme involving a phony doctor, and then he's recovered too quickly, and without the ransom money being picked up, and it turns out the kidnapping -- well, you'll see for yourself. Let me just observe that the methods of the kidnappers involves scientific ingenuity raised to evil genius. Not recently have I seen a movie with a better reason why the worst bad guy cannot be allowed to sink to the ocean floor along with the crashed airplane.

But not another word about that. Jason Statham is amusing as a man whose emotions are so well under control that he can barely be bothered to have any. He stars in several martial arts sequences in which he wipes out whole platoons of enemies. They're deployed by Gianni (Alessandro Gassman), a really big, really mean, really smart villain. Modine efficiently plays the role of the sniveling bureaucrat, Amber Valetta is effective as his long-suffering wife, and Kate Nauta plays Lola, a deadly vixen who considers herself dressed after she's troweled on her eye makeup; for Lola, it's run, mascara, run.

There's a development of some interest to students of product placement. The Transporter drives an Audi. The first shots of the titles play like a commercial for the car. It's quite a car, all right, taking full advantage of the all-wheel drive as it survives those incredible stunts. So sturdy is its construction that after it crashes through the concrete wall while jumping to the other building, there's not even a scratch on the shiny silver circles on the front of the car.

Strange: On the very same day I saw this movie, I saw another thriller, "Memory of a Killer," in which the characters hate BMWs so much, they urinate into the cars' keyholes. In between, I saw a movie about Truman Capote that mostly featured Chevrolets, which must come as a relief to the BMW home office in Bavaria. It's bad enough when The Transporter switches brands, but when Capote drops you, you're over.

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