Movie Review: Transporter 3

Wow… Ok, if you saw The Transporter and loved it, then you most likely went to see The Transporter 2… and hated it.  Well… Hates a strong word – its really only the one scene that make everyone cringe when they think of the sequel.  The scene where the movie jumps the shark – Jason Stamos, in an attempt to remove a bomb from his car, flips the car upside down and in mid-air scrapes the bomb off the bottom of the car by passing under a crane hook, saving the car and himself by mere seconds.  Most of the audience was thinking, why not just get out and take it off or run over a speed bump really fast, or anything other than the impossible mess I just saw.

Dismissing the why, just accomplishing this feat is impossible.  I call these moments ‘leaps of logic’.  Scenes that defy the rules of physics; my wife rolls her eyes when a moment like that ruins a movie for me since the movie itself is often a ridiculous plot in outerspace or involving monsters or supernatural creatures of some sort, however physics are physics.  For instance, traveling faster than the speed of light isn’t (or at least typically isn’t) regarded as possible, however most space-based TV shows and movies involve faster than light travel.  This isn’t a leap of logic because the shows give my brain something to dismiss it – subspace time travel… OK I’m losing you, I know.  Back to Transporter 3…

If you saw both the original and the sequel, AND are interested in seeing the third movie, then I put you in one of two camps – you either simply were not bothered by the crane-bomb scene in the second movie or you hope the producers listened to the critics and ensure that nothing so ridicules makes it into the third movie.  I was in the latter group, the producers made this movie for the first group.

If the crane-bomb scene didn’t bother you than 20 or 30 such scenes won’t either, right?  Like say putting a man through a concrete block wall with a single punch and having him get up un-scathed would be fine (don’t cite super-hero comic movies, they give my brain an excuse – they are super-human and can take the abuse).  How about floating a car from the bottom of a lake using nothing but a couple of duffle bags and the air from the cars tires?  Think that’s tuff – try doing that while the car is sinking and using the air from the tires to breath while creating the duffle bag balloons.

Ok – lets move past the leaps of logic that bother me, others don’t mind as much as I do… the plot, acting, and action should be enough to redeem that anyway, right?  Well… The plot was weak – it felt a lot like they made this movie so that the series would be a trilogy, not because there was any compelling story to tell – and they threw in the currently popular Hollywood lick the bark mindset, because why not, right.  The acting – its an action flick, the acting is irrelevant.  It wasn’t so bad as to get in the way, but it wasn’t so good that you are sucked into caring about the characters – which is right on the mark for an action movie.  The action?

Well, the fight scenes were good, but the car scenes were too few to be a transporter movie.  Most of the hand to hand combat scenes were obviously coryographed – I mean like bad-guy-swings-putting-his-arm-in-position-to-be-grabbed-and-holds-extended-position-for-1.2-seconds-while-good-guy-wraps-said-arm-up-with-shirt kinda obvious.  Still, the fight scenes were the highlight of the film.

To top it off, continuity issues abound.  I don’t  mean like in one scene the pen is in his pocket but in the next its missing kind of stuff… more like “weren’t the airbags deployed in that last since, when did he get the dash fixed and the airbags put back”, or “didn’t he just bust out both windows, he must of had those replaced during the subsecond switch between camera 1 and camera 2” kind of stuff.

If you think Jason Stamos is the best action star ever then you might consider renting this using your Netflix account since it doesn’t cost you thing more than you are already paying.  Otherwise… don’t bother.