The Transporter Refueled

As an action thriller, The Transporter Refueled is strictly middle of the road (no pun intended).  It's uninspired, curiously flat, and has not one single action sequence that is able to raise the adrenaline of its audience.  No, not even the scene where the hero drives his car through the interior of an airport.  If I must be honest, it is a better movie than the recent Hitman: Agent 47.  Faint praise, indeed.

For those of you who are not familiar with The Transporter films (this is the fourth entry), here's a brief rundown.  The Transporter is Frank Martin, an ex-Special Forces soldier who now makes his living generally as a getaway driver for hire.  Naturally, this job gets him into a lot of car chases, martial arts fights, and thrilling stunts.  The plots in the films are more or less interchangeable, but the formula more or less remains the same.  In the earlier films, Jason Statham played Frank.  But, he's been busy playing the villain in Furious 7, as well as giving one of the best comedic performances of the year in the hilarious Melissa McCarthy comedy Spy.  So, he couldn't make it for this sequel.  Instead, we get Ed Skrein as Frank Martin this time around.  Skrein is obviously trying his hardest to emulate Statham's icy steel stare, and low gravelly voice.  But, he's just not that interesting to watch, and doesn't have the same level of intimidation that Statham can give with a single look.  He's making the effort, but we just don't buy it.

As the film opens, Frank is reunited with his recently-retired father (Ray Stevenson), and is looking forward to some quality time, until he is called in for another job.  A sexy and mysterious woman named Anna (Loan Chabanol) wants Frank to meet her outside of a bank later that day to pick up some "packages", and deliver them for her.  The packages turn our to be her equally sexy and mysterious cohorts, who have just helped Anna pull off a bank heist in order to rob a local crime boss (Radivoje Bukvic).  It turns out the women are high-end call girls who work for the Russian mobster, and they are planning to bring down his empire in order to get back at him for stealing their youths and lives.  They want Frank to drive them about town to his various operations, and steal money from him in a variety of wild and impractical scenarios.  In order to make sure he cooperates, they take his father hostage.  But don't worry about the guy too much.  If anything, Frank's dad seems to be enjoying being held captive by prostitutes, and even strikes up a relationship with one of them.

The Transporter Refueled is as silly and nonsensical as the earlier movies, so that's not really the problem.  What is a problem is how low energy the movie is.  Action thrillers are supposed to have us either on the edge of our seats, or make us pump our fists into the air whenever some great stunt or action sequence plays out.  This movie is completely tepid, and fails to raise a reaction from its audience.  Take the recent movie No Escape, which has been panned by most critics, but I kind of admired.  That was a movie full of tension, and it kept me involved almost from beginning to end.  Not only were the main characters likable, but when they found themselves in a dangerous situation, the movie knew how to build excitement by putting the characters in one increasingly tense or thrilling scene after another.  The movie was implausible, but it worked for me because I was invested in what was happening.

Here, all we get are some slick, overly edited fight and chase scenes that look like they were staged and overly choreographed.  Nothing flows, nothing is natural, and everything feels like it's been rehearsed way too many times.  This creates no excitement in the audience, because the actors look like they've been programmed to do these stunts.  The fight scenes also lack tension because this is another one of those movies where the bad guys are polite enough to usually attack Frank one at a time, instead of taking him on all at once and possibly overpowering him.  When you see the villains standing around, waiting for Frank to take out the current thug he's fighting, it looks like they're waiting for the cue.  The movie even has one of those nonsensical sequences, where the villain climbs up a rock formation for absolutely no reason, other than the filmmakers thought it would be a good locale for a fight scene, and so that he can fall off of it when it's done.  There is absolutely no reason why he would climb up there, other than the script tells him to.

This is not an unwatchable movie by any means, but it just doesn't try harder than it has to.  It's the kind of sterile, over-produced action film that we get probably a dozen times a year, and nobody remembers after its opening weekend.  Should the franchise continue, not only do I suggest getting Statham back in the driver's seat, but also amping the thrills up to a level where the audience has a great time, instead of watching things unfold passively.

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