Thursday, September 17, 2015

Movie Review #310: "The Transporter Refueled" (2015)

Movie"The Transporter Refueled"
Ticket Price: $9.75
Director: Camille Delamarre
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes
Image Source
Frank junior (Ed Skrein) is a professional driver who transports people and items of an often criminal nature. He is hired by a woman who unbeknownst to him has kidnapped his father in order to blackmail him into helping her and her partners with their plan. 

Holy hell, we actually just sat through this movie. Do we get a gold star? A present? Our money back??? At this point, we feel like we deserve it.

"The Transporter Refueled" is a reboot of the already terrible "The Transporter" series. Replacing Jason Statham in the lead role of Frank junior is Ed Skrein, the dollar store version of James Marsden if he were on meth, who many may remember from "Game of Thrones," where he played Daario Naharis for three episodes before opting to leave the show in order to make this film. He was then replaced by Michiel Huisman, who went on to be a great success as the bodyguard and lover to the Mother of Dragons. If you're thinking to yourself, "he left one of, if not the most successful television shows in history to do this shitty reboot?" then yes, you read that right. Ed Skrein gave up a major role on one of the most popular television shows to star in this steaming pile of crap. Great call there, Ed. Skrein spends the whole film trying to show us how hard he is, how Jason Statham he is, and this only reinforces the audience's vexation with that fact that EuropaCorp refused to pay Statham $11 million for a 4th Transporter installment...gee, don't you think if they had even slightly glanced at the worldwide box office numbers for the other films in the franchise, they'd see Statham's Transporter actually made its money back and then some for each film? We just don't understand the point of rebooting a franchise and doing it poorly, giving the public an even more negative perception of a series than it already had with one of the biggest current action stars in the lead role.

As you can probably already tell, we did not like this movie in the slightest. First off, the story is beyond horrible. This isn't unusual for a Transporter picture, but this one in particular is extra stupid, on top of being so poorly paced and so contrived. It made us angry at the film and ourselves that we actually bothered to sit through it at all. With the plot being so utterly ridiculous, it makes the action less enjoyable. We don't care if Ed succeeds or fails in his mission because we don't care about anything surrounding it. We were actually bored watching what should be an edge of your seat action thriller, and even contemplated leaving the otherwise empty theater about 20 minutes into its run time. The basic outline of the film is there are four women who were forced into prostitution, possibly underage, 15 years prior, and have devised the most convoluted plan in the history of mankind to steal a bunch of money from their pimp's partners and try to frame their pimp for it. In order to do this, they kidnap Frank's dad, played by dollar store Russell Crowe Ray Stevenson, and blackmail Frank junior into helping them pull off their idiotic scheme. One of the biggest failures here is fully succeeding in making us care about the plight of these four women in particular. Yes, human trafficking and the sex trade are common, awful themes in action films, but they have also been better handled elsewhere. Even a movie like "Taken" shows the real horrors of this where girls are kidnapped, are kept drugged and barely conscious, being constantly abused and mistreated by their "keepers." This isn't really the case here. "The Transporter Refueled" makes it look like working for this pimp is a constant party with wealthy people on yachts and getting drunk in fancy hotels where many women willingly participate, especially the baddie's right hand lady who stuck by him regardless of what he did to her, which to us, makes light of the whole problem. The gangsters here also seem to be the dumbest, least dangerous group of people in the history of organized crime. It's like they did one drive-by 15 years ago and no one has challenged them since, giving them a complex that they are actually successful in the world of crime. It's hard to imagine how these guys managed stay in power so long. Someone starts messing with their stuff and they just stand there looking dumbfounded with their thumbs up their butts. We also must add Frank's father is the easiest person in the world to kidnap. Hell, even Kim from the "Taken" movies put up a fight and tried to resist capture on several occasions. There is literally a scene in this movie where, 10 seconds after being dropped off by his Transporter son, Frank senior is kidnapped for a second time within the span of 40 minutes. What the fuck, Frank senior? And pro-tip, if you are ever shot in the stomach and bleeding all over the place, just pull out the bullet with some pliers, find yourself some dusty old cobwebs and sprinkle them with sugar, then shove them in the wound hole and you'll be right as rain, because you know, cobwebs and sugar = ~*miracle cure!~* Yes, this really happens in the movie, and then literally the next scene, the wounded woman in question has a threesome with Frank senior and another of the henchwomen, then is standing to see them off completely unscathed in the next. It's dumb inconsistencies like this that makes it seem when filmmakers actually decided to construct this poor attempt at a cash grab, they didn't really bother to flush out a coherent story. They just imagined what action stunts Jason Statham would do if he were actually appearing in this movie. Filmmakers, instead of focusing on making a good film, wondered about what would look cool on the big screen, then tried to patchwork something which appeared to be a story around it to give it a reason as to why it was happening on screen in the first place.

If you ever get the slightest inkling that you'd fancy watching this movie, just do yourself a favor: get up, walk to a wall, then bang your head against it for an hour and a half. It will most likely be less painful than actually sitting through this atrocity.

My Rating: 1.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 1.5/10
IMDB's Rating: 4.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 16%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!

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