‘Transporter’ Plot Tissue-Thin, But Action Decent

By Eric Lai
Special to AsianWeek

Jason Statham, the British star of The Transporter, the stylish new action flick coming out this week, and Vin Diesel, star of XXX, have a few things in common. Both are hypermuscular and super-cut in the fashion of Marvel comic superheroes, both have shaven skulls, which only accentuate the enormousness of their Neanderthal brow ridges, and both are applying — their respective movies serving as de facto resumes — for the currently-vacant position of Hollywood action king.

Schwarzenegger and Stallone are too busy enjoying their new AARP discounts to put out an entertaining movie; Willis and Gibson remain focused on flexing their acting chops, not their muscles (with the aid of one particularly hot Indian American director). Nicholas Cage and Tom Cruise may on occasion don a flak jacket or two, but the next moment Cage is dreamily strumming a mandolin, while Cruise is weeping for the loss of his good looks in a Phantom of the Opera mask.

The Transporter was originally scheduled for a summer release, but the success of XXX and the subsequent media attention foisted upon Diesel, the half-Italian, half-African American star who broke out in the previous summer’s The Fast and the Furious (TFTF), caused Fox to hold it until now. That’s too bad: while I may be the only Asian Pacific American male under 35 who hasn’t seen TFTF, I did see XXX, and thought it was a rather lame, by-the-numbers spy thriller remarkable for only one action scene: the avalanche, for which I tip my hat in the direction of the computer animators who digitally created it. XXX’s makers claimed to be killing the ghost of James Bond, but as New Yorker critic David Denby so rightly pointed out, XXX really ripped the Bond formula off at every turn.

The Transporter is just as formulaic as XXX, but it doesn’t deny its heritage (the “honorable gangster” and wandering Ronin movies from Japan and Hong Kong). Lacking the pretensions and bloat of XXX (The Transporter clocks in at an efficient 90 minutes), I thought The Transporter was much more entertaining, with more authentic Hong Kong-style action, and a less-obnoxious hero.

Statham, who first gained notice in the Guy Ritchie gangster ensemble pictures, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, plays ex-U.S. Special Forces operative Frank Martin. He lives like a Zen monk alone by the ocean in the south of France, and occasionally does jobs delivering illicit goods or driving getaway for bank robbers in his souped-up BMW sedan.

Then one day, he is assigned to transport what turns out to be a young Chinese woman (played spazzily and with too much screaming by Hong Kong starlet, Shu Qi) in his trunk. He delivers her to the sneering young crime boss, Wall Street (an over-the-top Matt Schulze). In lieu of thanks, Martin’s car is blown up, him nearly in it, and he starts getting drawn in, unwillingly.

The plot, co-written by French art-house/action auteur Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Professional), and collaborator Robert Mark Kamen (The One) over what seems to be a single productive afternoon, is as tissue-thin as I’ve described. But just as you don’t go to Sizzler expecting to jumpstart your diet, don’t go to see The Transporter for the story. The fight scenes, while lacking the no-cutaway verité of a Jackie Chan or Jet Li movie, are creative. Take the scene — in the preview — in which you hear the ring of the doorbell and see one of the thugs get up to look through the peephole, just as Martin jumps to kick the door down. Or another scene, in which Martin, outnumbered, douses himself and his opponents with motor oil and straps on bicycle pedals, to even the odds.

For that, credit both Statham — a former British Olympic diver who moves so silently on-screen that his explosions into violence are that much more startling — and veteran Hong Kong kung fu director Corey Yuen Kwai. A long-time collaborator with Jet Li — he directed Fong Sai Yuk I and II, and has served as action choreographer for all of Li’s recent Hollywood movies — Yuen’s Hollywood debut competently delivers what he knows best, and minimizes everything else.

Cultural trendspotters had been calling Diesel (real name Mark Vincent) with his X-Gamer ‘tude and his multiracial parentage, the symbol of the new 20-something generation. Never mind that Diesel/Vincent is closer to 50 than 20, dislikes discussing his biracial heritage, and with his ridiculously gravelly voice, preening testosterone presence, and buffed, shaven body, is just one career “smackdown” away from embracing his true vocation as a professional wrestler. Statham comes off, by contrast, as the real goods. If The Transporter hits it big, a la Lethal Weapon or Die Hard, Statham could become that rarest of things: a British action hero, rather than villain, in Hollywood.