Movie Review: "The Transporter" (2002)

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Movie: "The Transporter"
Director: Louis Leterrier & Corey Yuen
Year: 2002
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is a professional driver who transports people and items, most often of an illegal nature. He lives by a clear set of rules meant to keep him and his packages out of trouble., but when one of his packages isn't what he expects, this leads to a conflict with the men who hired him.

This movie is so bad, we can't even bring ourselves to watch the two sequels.

Oh boy, where to begin? Let's just say this up front: "The Transporter" is an awful movie. We're not sure how anyone thinks this is a good film, and furthermore, we're not sure why anyone would defend it at their favorite movie. A fresh-faced Jason Statham plays Frank Martin, who is basically a criminal courier and getaway driver for hire. Despite being one of the best in his business, he performs all of his criminal activities in his own personal vehicle and yet doesn't worry about being caught because he changes the licence plate when on the job. ~*oh okay~* The film establishes his driving ability and strict adherence to his own personal rules through an opening bank robbery and subsequent unrealistic chase scene which enters the realm of too over-the-top quite quickly. A short time later, Frank is hired to transport a package which, when it's revealed what (or should we say who) the package is, we wonder why he was ever hired to do this transport in the first place. Then, we are led to a series of the most contrived set of circumstances, leading him to break his own set rules. He does eventually finish the job but when the man who hired tries to kill him by having him transport a bomb Frank heads back to get revenge.

We've already established this movie is absolutely stupid with a poorly thought out script which makes little to no sense. Defenders of the film will ask us, "what did we expect? It's meant to be a mindless action film." That might offer some slight excuse for the movie, if any, had it been the slightest bit fun or exciting, but it's not. It's plodding and dragging and awful. And we say this knowing fully well that this film essentially catapulted Jason Statham into become one of the biggest action stars of the moment at this present time. We like Jason Statham, but this movie sucks, period. It is so poorly written and we care so little about what's going on, the action winds up feeling boring and uneventful, which is just about the worst thing that could happen in an action flick. There is nothing redeeming about this movie. The acting is terrible (sorry, Statham, at least you've gotten more charismatic through the years), the writing is terrible, the fight sequences scream fake and choreographed, and the action is not entertaining in the slightest as it has all been seen before. By the end of the film's very short run time, it feels like we have been sitting on our asses for 3 hours and are just ready to be done with it. We can't imagine why anyone would want to reboot this trainwreck of a series, but at least this version from 2002 set a very low bar for any new movies to come. It would be hard to imagine the reboot being actually worse than this repetitive, unimaginative, bland, Wonder Bread in movie form of a film.

My Rating: 2.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 2.5/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 53%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!
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One year ago, we were watching: "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"