Better to stay home than see ‘Transporter 3′

“Transporter 3,” with trailers and credits, was just under two hours long.  This was a genuine shock when I looked down at my watch, because it felt like it took four days to watch.

Jason Statham’s action roles are all essentially the same because he’s virtually incapable of playing anyone other than Jason Statham. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, and some actors have made really lucrative careers doing it – Bruce Willis, for example, plays Bruce Willis in every action movie he’s in. 

Statham, however, doesn’t have the range that someone like Willis does, because even in his comedic roles, he plays Statham (“Yes, Tommy. Before ‘ze Germans’ get here.”)

“Transporter 3″ was little more than an exercise in futility and an endurance course of the absurd.  Maybe it was all fan service, but sitting down and watching this drivel actually skated completely around the periphery of mind-numbing to circle back and become true physical pain. 

I’ll sum up the plot in two sentences:  Frank Martin (Statham) is kidnapped and forced to transport some mysterious girl named Valentina (Natalya Rudakova) – who needed to be cracked in the teeth the entire movie, just to show her the consequences of being herself – to an unspecified location by a guy (Robert Knepper) trying way to hard to be Gary Oldman from “The Professional.”  Frank is wearing a bracelet that will explode if he goes 75 feet away from the car.

That’s it.  Nothing else is important.  There’s some subplot involving the dumping of nuclear waste in the Ukraine (which I named “Vague-istan” until two-thirds of the movie was over and I finally figured out where the hell this was taking place) and a romantic subplot that can, and should be completely ignored.

The fight scenes were okay, but there were too few and they were marred by the fact that every time a punch or kick connected it must have somehow hit the cameraman as well, because the scene would rock and shake and I’d lose sense of where I was.

Everything else was terrible:  The dialogue was hokey and forced, the special effects were phoned in and the acting had to have been lifted from post-Soviet eastern European dictatorship propaganda films.

The bottom line: “The Transporter” series was weak at best, and this newest link in the chain may be the downfall of film as we know it.  OK, maybe not, but it definitely ranks up there among the worst films of 2008.  Maybe not number one, but top five at least.