The Transporter

Jason Statham begins what will, one hopes, be a long career as an action hero in "The Transporter." After all, as the titular underworld enabler, Statham shows us all the necessary skills. He can beat people up in many different ways, from fevered gunslinging to sock-‘em martial artistry, but he's sensitive enough to enjoy a tempestuous impromptu fling with a beautiful hostage. He's got a torso worthy of carving into marble, a bullet-shaped bald head, and drills of blue eyes that come alive only occasionally but to chilling effect. Most importantly, he's cool; he's got that combination of emotional detachment, nonchalance towards authority and relentless determination that distinguish many of our finest action superstars.

Even the resounding defeat Statham suffers at the forces arrayed against him attempting to make "The Transporter" into a bad movie - tone-deaf direction, a script that plunges into an abyss of irremediable nonsensicality midway through the film, a costar who can't speak the language she's attempting to act in - doesn't completely dampen one's optimism about Statham's future endeavors. He could well star in a great action movie, even though this one ain't it.

And whoo boy is "The Transporter" not a great action movie. After an opening extravaganza of hair-raisingly unsafe driving maneuvers to get some moronic lowlifes away from a bank they've just robbed, transporter Frank Martin takes as his next payload not money or drugs but a human being in a gym bag. This particular human being is named Lai Kwai and is played by Hong Kong idol Qi Shu, but regardless of how people in Hong Kong feel, Martin would just as well drop her off and get on with the next job. However, human sympathies intervene, the transporter gives her a sip of Orangina, and soon our man Martin is drawn into a web of intrigue so complex even the screenwriters could not decipher it.

One of these screenwriters is Luc Besson, who as a writer, director and producer is beloved in the action community for blowing up a bunch of stuff in "The Fifth Element" and allowing Jean Reno to dirty up the screen with his near-oxymoronic French manliness in "The Professional." Here, however, with the ineffectual aid of Robert Mark Kamen, he has crafted a script that, after minute 45, makes no damn sense - there's something about a shipping container full of exploited Chinese landing at Marseilles for transport to Britain, except that no one makes it clear how they plan to make money off this, or even why you would need to land the container at Marseilles and ship it overland to Nice before it goes to England. But Martin sure does have to stop them. The dialogue, too, goes from reasonable to howl-inducing as the film moves on, nearly ending on one line I cannot recount - it would give away too much plot - that will have you gasping in paroxysms of astonished laughter at the fact that something like this made it past numerous sentient quality controls to a theater near you.

In his role as producer, Besson hired Qi, a dark-eyed, full-lipped siren who would no doubt steal all our hearts if she could speak even a little bit of English. Those are English words coming out of her mouth, to be sure, but the odd stresses and clipped pronunciation betray a limited understanding of their meaning; given the crap she has to say, she may be better off for this noncomprehension, but the language problem makes it impossible to regard Lai as anything but the most unnutritious eye candy. Qi also screeches in fear way, way too much. For the heavies, Besson hired Ric Young and Matt Schulze, two of the hammiest action actors around - not the men you want to nurture a laughable script to entertaining cinematic life.

Neither is director Cory Yuen, another Hong Kong import. Yuen has a nice feel for the visual flow of an action scene, it is true - the opening car chase is a thing of beauty due to Yuen's ministrations as much as Statham's, and various other scenes testify to his facility with stylizing explosions and martial arts. However, Yuen can't do anything else "The Transporter" needs: get Young and Schulze to stop chewing the scenery, pack the movie full enough of action to disguise the screenplay's faults (though this may have been impossible), or (especially) select appropriate musical accompaniments to the action he's directing. The score thinks Lai and Martin fall in love about thirty minutes before the script thinks they do, and most of the music has been selected from the bargain bin of superficial hip-hop thuggery even when an actual composition was needed.

One uniquely Bessonish touch remains: the craggy, wise, thick-accented, Proust-quoting detective Tarconi, played by Francois Berleand. Tarconi and Martin play their own cat-and-mouse game through much of "The Transporter," and their baited questions and enigmatic asides satisfy in a way that the rest of this movie can't even imagine. There is a certain style, a kind of dead-serious insouciance, required to make the crappy action movie both fun and thrilling, and Berleand and Statham both have plenty of it. The rest of this movie falls apart due to corrosive silliness, making a disappointing outing for Besson, a name action lovers have come to trust. Hopefully the name Statham (not to mention the name Berleand) will not suffer in action-movie casters' minds because "The Transporter" failed to deliver.

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