The Transporter

Christopher Fowler rated The Transporter as one of his top ten crime films in a recent newspaper piece, and this prompted me to take a look at a movie which was screened in 2002 and has spawned two sequels.

The eponymous ‘transporter’ is Jason Statham, whom I encountered recently in the popular but, to my mind unsatisfactory, Crank. Here he is in excellent form, as Frank Martin, an ex-soldier who earns a very good living in the south of France, transporting people and packages. The film begins with his giving a lift – by way of a frenetic car chase - to a group of bank robbers (who fail to engage him to take them to their next destination, and finish up under arrest.)

Frank is then hired by a villain called ‘Wall Street’ to deliver a package. When the package starts to squirm, he breaks his own rules and, succumbing to curiosity, he opens it up – to discover a gorgeous Chinese girl called Lai. He duly delivers her, but after falling out with his hirer, he rescues her, and a relationship of sorts develops between them.

I enjoyed this film. Yes, it may be described as a bit mindless, but of its kind, it is very well done (Crank is an example of how not to do it) and the pace never relents. The downside is that the plot is rather thin, and there’s not much of an attempt to make it all plausible. ( I never really figured out why Lai was put in the package in the first place – if anyone can explain this, I’d be glad to know.)

If you’re looking for sensitive insight into the human condition, The Transporter is not for you. But I go along with Chris Fowler - as a piece of fast-moving escapism, it’s pretty good.

Crank

Crank is a 2006 movie starring Jason Statham as a hit man with an embryonic conscience, who is pumped full of a drug which is intended to kill him in an hour. His assailant, a fellow gangster, leaves him a DVD to explain his fate, but fails to bargain for Statham’s persistence in trying to save himself from a fate even worse than death – that is, approaching death knowing what is going to happen to you, but aware that you are powerless to do anything about it.

So much for the premise of the movie. It is, in more ways than one, an adrenaline-packed thriller, but really it’s just a comic book translated to the silver screen and it certainly didn’t thrill me. Statham is not, at least in the first half of the movie, a character for whom I felt any sympathy at all. In fact, there were moments when I wanted the end to come even sooner than it did. The story-line is so wildly over the top that to say suspension of disbelief is required is a massive under-statement.

The film does have its plus points, including shafts of black humour – often grisly or vulgar, but sometimes genuinely funny, for those not of a sensitive disposition. Nor is it as mindlessly slick as it pretends. But it’s not a film I’d be in a tearing hurry to watch again.