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Frank (Jason Statham) is a transporter: he delievers packages from one bad guy to the next, no questions asked. Or he may even carry passangers, as seen from the first scene. But when he opens a package that seems to be moving and screaming, things start to turn to the worse. Soon everybody is trailing Frank and trying to kill him. Just an ordiniary day in the life of a transporter.
The opening car chase scene is the coolest one I've ever seen in movies. Sure it's unlikely (nay...impossible), but this movie isn't about what can happen in real life. The subsequent chases pale in comparision, but are still pretty cool.
The plot, however, is anything but cool. In the first half, the plot was the consequence of opening the package. In the second half, it's about 400 Asian immigrants and the girl (Qi Shu) from the package's father working for the bad guy. Or something like that. Action movies like this are supposed to have you not really think about anything except for basic plot and explosions (like the one at the rest stop...awesome!), but you had to follow the plot or else you wouldn't understand what was happening.
The best non-car-chase fight sequence was in the bus station. Buses...$35,000. Fighting ten guys on an oiled floor...priceless. At some times, Statham's moves seemed like he was break-dancing. Speaking of Statham, he could be the next action hero. With his Bond-like stunts and his Diesel-like build, move over Brosnan! There's a new hero in town.
Shu was good as a girl with tape over her mouth, but she soon became an obnoxious person who wasn't fun to be with. Shu, and almost everyone else in the movie, had accents that were hard to understand a lot of times. If they learned anything from The Osbournes, it is that they can put subtitles in English-it'll help!
The music was right on-key, helping tense the situation and then relax us, and then tense us up again. In the beginning, the sound FX really helped to bring out the quality of the sound. Music can be obnoxious if used in the wrong places, but in some places, like The Transporter, it helps bring out the mood.
The bad guys, on the con side of the film, were so one-dimensional that they must have aced Stupid Bad Guys 101. On the test: Question 1: True or False: When the person you're supposed to kill disappears, just assume that he died. They must of tried to kill him and "succeeded" three times. What a load of idiots. And some of the film was so utterly unbelieveable. Statham just knows how to scuba-dive, parachute, has a giant house with an underwater passage to another house connected to it and has a million Mercedeses. Right...
Well, enough of my mumbo-jumbo. If you just skipped down here to have me cut to the chase, here it is: Fun, mucho action, and some awesome chases counter against one-dimensional bad guys and horrible plot. I'm not sure if I recommend it or not, I guess just see it for yourself to figure it out.
Rated PG-13 for strong action violence and some language.
Review Date: October 26, 2002