James Bond. Jason Bourne. Frank Martin. With this third film, the driver makes his way up into the realm of super dudes with guns, boots and hands that kill and spill. Unlike Bond and Bourne, Martin’s gruff voice and “no rules” attitude makes him different. I have never seen the first two films, but the third movie is actually one worth seeing again.
Frank Martin (Jason Statham, Death Race) has retired from the transporting business and spends days in his posh house, occaisionally fishing with his friend Inspector Tarconi (Francois Bereland, The Transporter). One night a car crashes through the wall of Martin’s estate, almost killing the driver and passenger. The driver is Malcom Manville, a pupil of Martin’s, who was carrying Valentina (Natalya Rudakova), the daughter of Leonid Vasilev (Jeroen Krabbe, The Fugitive), the head of the EPA in Ukraine. Through a series of events, Martin is captured by an American known only as Johnson (Robert Knepper, FOX’s Prison Break) and is forced to transport Valentina to Odessa, the capital of Ukraine, while having a steel bracelet attached to his wrist that will kill him if he gets more than 75 feet away from the car. It turns out that Johnson is trying to take control of international resources by using a company that is negotiating a contract with the Ukraine EPA (This isn’t a plot spoiler, you find out early). Martin has to escape the clutches of Johnson while protecting Valentina, and still stay within 75 feet of his Audi.
This was actually a very enjoyable film. Statham was very good. While he is nowhere near as good as Daniel Craig in the recent Bond movies or Matt Damon in the Bourne films, he has a certain swagger that is unlike Bond’s and is nowhere to be found in Bourne. He is not a playboy like Bond, but a do-it-yourself kind of guy. Statham brings that out well. Knepper, who plays bad guy Theodore Bagwell in Prison Break, is like the low-key villain we’re beginning to see in films like Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. He’s good at it though.
I “like” how more films are going evironmental while sticking to the action like how Seth Meyers “likes” how the candidates didn’t answer the questions in the Presidential Debates. Quantum of Solace involved a man trying to control the world’s water supply and WALL-E shows the destruction of the Earth by being negligent. This whole “global-warming” thing is kinda nuts anyways.
Olivier Megaton did a satisfactory job as a first-time American director. The script, written by Transporter scribes Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, was good and even humorous at times. I didn’t plan on seeing this one but am now glad that I did.
Grade: B
