WOWTours.com Blog

By D’Arcy Kavanagh

When the first Transporter film hit the screen in 2002, it showed up with a sense of chaos, a sense of place and a sense of fun.  Just as the world has changed, so too has this series and not for the better.
Jason Statham is back as the laconic Frank Martin who seems even more world-weary than in Transporter 2 when he was basically disgusted by one and all.  In Transporter 3, Martin’s prodigious car-driving talents are once again in demand by bad guys who look nasty but clearly flunked out of Villain School due to ineptitude. As usual, Martin has his set of unbreakable rules that he keeps having to break. As the French would tell Frank in Marseille where the film begins, “C’est la vie.”
In Transporter 1, Martin kept busy along the Cote d’Azur and that meant scenery galore. In Transporter 3, he’s in Provence for a handful of minutes before he must head east – never getting 50 metres from his car for fear of an exploding device being triggered while he has to deliver yet another “package.”  He and his companion, a spoiled young woman who threatens to make Martin even more laconic, race toward their fate but the scenery is gone. Forget the French Alps or the glories of Austria. Think gas stations and dreary forests.
To ensure the movie is current with its themes, Transporter 3 has damage to the environment at the core of its plot.  If Frank doesn’t get his passenger into the hands of the villains, then there’ll be a change of a vote at a European government session and that will lead to environmental damage and who cares? Like the new 007 film Quantum Solace, the environmental connection is weak and unsatisfying, merci bien.
For a smart guy with world-class bad luck – maybe that’s why he’s so laconic - Martin just can’t escape the car, his passenger, the bad guys, the threat to the environment and assaults on his clothing. Still, he occasionally has a chance to exhibit his other skills and engage a score of bad guys in hand-to-hand combat. As the French would say, “Encore?” Statham, who still controls the screen despite his character’s shortcomings, handles all the action with his usual brawny, bare-chested aplomb, but he simply can’t save this slapdash thriller.
It’s clear from Transporter 3 that this series has run out of gas.
Travel tip: Frank Martin isn’t the only one who drives crazily in Provence. While this section of France is astonishingly beautiful, it is also loaded with local motorists who lack a certain patience and with tourists who are often too busy checking the myriad of signs to notice the road. So, as the French would say, “Attention!”