THE TRANSPORTER (2002)

THE TRANSPORTER (2002)

Tagline: Rules are made to be broken

(Action, Crime, So Who You Have in The Bag?) [PG-13]

Ten seconds, two choices. One, the information; the papers or your brains on the desk. Now tell me I'm lying.

In this one ex-special forces officer Frank Martin lives in the French Mediterranean and he has honed his skills to become a rather effective transporter. People pay him large sums of money to get sensitive items from point A to point B discreetly. As a rule, Frank never asks what the item he’s transporting is, only in this case it’s clearly a live person. Events unfold that could get Frank killed…is this person worth his life? 

First off, I recently saw this question posed on a social media platform asking what people’s favorite fictional driver was and Frank Martin came up. Allegedly Jason Statham who plays Frank Martin did nearly all of the driving for his character in this movie himself. He also appears in the DEATH RACE series and the FAST & THE FURIOUS series all having to do with driving. 

The action in this is a lot like a run-of-the-mill martial arts spy flick, along the lines of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE if MISSION IMPOSSIBLE was set to rap music and a lot more in the “I am pretty sure you can’t do that in real life” model. Because of this, some say you have to be pretty immature to enjoy this flick, but I just love big over the top, jump 5 feet in the air, do a back flip, and kick someone’s teeth out, type of movies. If I wanted realism, I wouldn’t be going to the movies to get it. I would just take the city bus downtown. 

One thing this movie does pretty well, is take Frank from this almost careless hardened person that wants nothing to do with people in bags, splitting a bowl of Ramen, or having breakfast cooked for them, to a person willing to risk their life for others. We see something similar in THE MEG, but that character had a connection to the person he was trying to save. In this movie, he doesn’t. I don’t think this was a bad script either. Luc Besson who handles the writing duties isn’t just some fly-by-night guy with no resume. He wrote THE FIFTH ELEMENT and NIKITA for Pete’s sake. His writing partner on this one Robert Mark Kamen co-wrote THE TRANSPORTER films, and 50 Episodes of the TV show “Cobra Kai”. 

The score is good, but I think a few of the soundtrack choices could have been changed up to mix things up a bit. When it comes to the acting I felt like Shu Qi (JOURNEY TO THE WEST) handled her own as Lai. This movie made me want to watch more stuff she’s in. Clearly, I already like Jason Statham so that wasn’t an issue. François Berléand brings some “I am willing to bend the rules to do the right thing” to this film as Inspector Tarconi, but I haven’t heard of anything else he’s been in aside from this series. Matt Schulze is a pretty decent bad guy in this as Wall Street. Like Statham, he also shows up in the FAST & THE FURIOUS series. 

I am not going to say there is a lot of original stuff here, some of it feels borrowed from other movies even going back to LETHAL WEAPON 2, however, I had a lot of fun with it and I am kind of surprised I passed on this series when it came out. Overall this was a solid flick I would definitely watch again. I haven’t seen the other 2, so I have nothing to compare it to regarding the entire series, but I give this one a solid 5 out of 7. There weren’t any sequences I would have cut out.

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