The Transporter 3 is so embarrassingly bad in almost every way, the hardest part of reviewing it is knowing where to begin. The direction is as good a place as any. When confronted with a film whose tagline is “This time the rules are the same — except one,” directed by a former graffiti artist who insists on calling himself Oliver Megaton, the only reasonable response is to lower your eyes, clench your hands together and softly whisper “What, oh Lord? What have I done to incur thy wrath?”
The plot of the film, like its two predecessors, follows a particularly unlikely day in the life of Frank Martin (Jason Statham), whose job is curtly described as “transporter” by the other characters in the film, but described far more accurately as iron-bodied murder machine by this reviewer. After one of Frank's friends smashes his car through Frank's living room wall and asks him for help — no joke — Frank is enlisted in a nefarious scheme by Johnson (Robert Knepper) to help an evil multinational corporation extort waste disposal rights from Ukrainian environment minister Leonid Vasilev (Jeroen Krabbe) by, uh, driving around Europe with Vasilev's irritating daughter for a day.
But wait, don't pay attention to the flimsy, contrived plot, shouts Megaton. There's a twist! Both Frank and Vasilev's insufferable daughter (Natalya Rudakova) have been equipped with bracelets that will explode if they wander more than 75 feet away from Frank's car. That's right, the entirety of the film's action hinges upon a contrivance straight out of 1993.
Now, hilariously dated plot devices are something big, silly action movies can get away with if they're executed with intelligence or irony (just look at Quantum of Solace), but The Transporter 3 is completely without either. Here's a few laugh-out-loud moments from the film:
1. Frank raises his car off the bottom of a lake by inflating two duffel bags with the air from the tires.
2. Frank magics his car up onto two wheels to fit between two freight haulers.
3. Frank incapacitates a room full of thugs in a flurry of acrobatic martial arts that ends up playing out as two parts gay striptease, one part bondage fetish. Thank you, Oliver Megaton, for completely destroying every argument that's ever been made against homoeroticism in action films.
Yet, for a film that so flippantly defies reason at every turn, The Transporter 3 still insists on taking itself seriously at the most inappropriate moments. “I don't a-think you are afraid of the dying,” says the minister's tedious daughter in adorably broken English, her eyes wide and sincere, while a Portishead remix swells in the background. “I a-think you are afraid of living.” She then forces herself on Statham so aggressively it borders on rape. Combine this scene with a completely unnecessary sci-fi explanation of the exploding bracelets, a few too many cutaways of macho brooding and all the aforementioned mind-numbing action, and you have a film with nary a watchable moment in it.
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