Transporter 3 demonstrated all of the points I’d been discussing beforehand. It even had the mighty Statham’s character, Frank, wake up in just his shorts after a stint of being unconscious, looking as though the bad guys responsible had covered him with a fine sheen of grease, or at the very least turned up the temperature in the room to ‘man sweat’ levels. The great thing about T3, though, is that it embraces all its clichés with open arms, a fantastic sense of humour and even makes reference to the overt sexuality of all the shirtless fighting (nay, whipping!), as Frank’s Ukrainian female passenger gazes longingly at his fighting prowess, while later accusing him of being “the gay” when he rebuffs her advances. His retort to her accusation is to say “I’m not ‘the gay’,” and had she ever considered that he just wasn’t in the mood? Proof, indeed, that Freud’s head would explode if he ever came close to this film. The plot though remains ludicrously high concept, as is befitting for any self-respecting Jason Statham film. This time he can’t be more than 75 feet from his car without his newly acquired bracelet blowing him sky high, leading to the kind of ingenuity stunt-wise that makes T3 a closer relation to Statham’s other (soon to be franchise) Crank, although it can never quite match the sheer insanity of that film. Special mention, though should go to the scene which sees him chase down a car on a BMX, while The Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog blares out, which in itself gets a big gold star from me. The only real letdown for me, as has been the case far too many times with action films over the last few years, was the editing. When Corey Yuan is choreographing fight scenes, it seems like a criminal waste to fall into the gutless, stylistic trap of making each shot last no more than two seconds. Admittedly, it never quite got as out of hand as the opening car chase in Quantum of Solace, but then what possibly could? I’m getting increasingly tired of losing track of who’s doing what during a fight the minute the editor decides to have a seizure ,and it needs to stop right now. It still saddens me that the original action cuts from the first Transporter have never been restored. Even Statham comments on how they had a much better flow before they were cut to grab a lower rating. All hail King Statham – Crank 2: High Voltage can’t come soon enough. Duncan would like to dedicate this article to all the heterosexual men out there, who fight on a daily basis against adversity from their girlfriends, who just don’t understand how growing up with 80s action movies informed their influential minds of the way men should behave. Further evidence of our confusion can be found in this rather exciting piece of news http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000230/news#ni0615129 in which the writer (who isn’t me) exclaims, “My pants have shrunk!” You are not alone, brother.
