On Friday evening I was tired, weak and vulnerable to dozing in front of a rubbish movie. Refreshed on Saturday morning, I realise The Transporter ultimately robbed me of an hour and a half of my life.

I am angry and it's time for revenge.
 
**rant commences**

The Transporter is the kind of film I really dislike; nonsensical but flashy, entertaining but ultimately shallow and vapid.
 
The plot

The Transporter (Jason Statham) is a cool dude who will transport anything no questions asked. The film opens with the Transporter waiting to transport some armed robbers to safety. One problem; they told him there would be three in the car while there are actually four (three robbers and the driver).

The Transporter goes into some detail to explain that he has calibrated the car and worked out the route to take account of the weight in the car, and he won't transport four. No matter that his weighty Merc probably means that an extra 80 kilos in the car won't make much difference to the overall weight; our transporter is an expert.

Our robbers start to sweat as time is passing, the car is beginning to be surrounded and the Transporter still refuses to set off. The problem is solved when one of the robbers is shot and pushed out of the car.

A visually impressive, but most unlikely car chase follows (not least because of the sheer number of police cars involved), as the Transporters carefully chosen route glides them to escape.

The opening scene gives the image that the Transporter is some kind of careful, calculating man with strict rules to ensure he keeps one step ahead of the law.

At the end of the scene, the Transporter goes home. I marvelled at how The Transporter also manages to find the time to keep such a well appointed house in Monaco. Unless he has a cleaner that does a few hours for him each week, he is a mean dude with a vacuum cleaner, with quite the eye for interior design.

This is one well domesticated, evil calculating criminal mind.

I was also impressed he had the foresight and vision to ensure his house has an underground water escape passage complete with functioning and well maintained oxygen tanks and masks. As it transpires, he was particularly skilled to have one prepared for a friend too "just in case". Perhaps he also has something of the Uri Geller about him?

 [As a complete aside, why didn't Uri Geller know that his friend Michael Jackson was in trouble?]  

I asked myself; does this Transporter ever sleep? His life must be a mundane routine of preparation, weighing cars, killing people, filling and checking oxygen tanks and continual dusting and tidying.

His next job is to transport a package from A to B. Along the way he gets a flat, and goes into the boot to find his package is body shaped and wriggling. He tries to ignore the body, but (as you do) stops and decides to buy the body an orange juice. Fortunately the pretty young girl (blow me down; who knew?) who is the body doesn't have a fruit allergy.

Of course, the Transporter at this point has a personality transplant. Rather than be the cold calculating killer, he decides he is a good guy, and as well as falling in love with the girl (Qi Shu) to the point where he can't say no, decides to help her save 350 illegal Chinese immigrants from a life of slavery.

The rest of the film covers his exploits fighting the slavery gang, where suddenly his shirt falls off revealing a well oiled muscled torso, and he does an Indiana Jones pathos by crawling around the outside of a moving truck.

I'll leave you to guess whether he saves the Chinese illegals from a life of slavery, instead giving them a life of months inside an immigration camp while their applications are processed, before being given a one way ticket back to China.   

My thoughts

The makers of this film should be tried for crimes against humanity.

Although the first 30 minutes or so of the movie play out well enough for a standard action movie, unfortunately the inconsistencies in the characters and the extremely poor plot just irritated me after. I didn't even get engaged enough to work out or care what the names of the characters were.

To me, there are enough fantastic real life stories from across the globe, without having to come up with some half baked plot, and this is exactly why I prefer books to movies. This sort of gung ho movie turns violent criminals into heroes, and helps justify crimes of war.    

Unfortunately, too many minds aren't critical enough when it comes to film, and there are still too many studios that can turn a profit with this kind of ill spun, badly thought out nonsense. Too many of us are happy with a visually exciting car chase, a naked chest and a pretty girl to worry too much about the garbage they are putting through our brain.
 
**rant over**

_________________________________________________

cr01 asserts his right to be associated as the author of this review -2009-    

Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12