**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Jason Statham, Shu Qui, Matt Schulze, Francois Berleand, and Ric Young.
Directed by Corey Yuen & written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
2002 PG13
For those who endlessly rove the Internet—or who, like me, are lucky enough to have IT friends do all your roving for you—“The Transporter” can be best understood as starting out like “The Hire” at BMWfilms.com and turning into xiaoxiaomovie.com. “The Hire” are short, highly-stylish films about an amoral urban mercenary who lives by a code and drives a BMW; “Xiao Xiao” is a bunch of stick figures beating the crap out of each other and defying the laws of physics with their kung-fu. The title character of “The Transporter” is just such a mercenary, but who breaks his code and finds himself…oh, I don’t know, beating the crap out of a whole lot of people.
He (Jason Statham), with his shaved head and crisp black suits, delivers packages and people, regardless of how degenerate his passengers are or whatever horrible thing they want delivered. But he has three rules: 1) no changing or negotiating the deal once it has been made; 2) no names; 3) no looking inside the package. For instance, in the opening car chase—a dazzling piece of work, by the way, that I never wanted to see end—he parks outside a French bank, waiting to pick up three men plus cargo. Four men emerge from the bank with masks and guns. They’re the men who hired him. Except he was hired to only deliver three men, not four. He has no qualms about aiding bank robbers. He just can’t stand that they broke the rules, so he shoots one of them and saves the rest.
Statham’s next assignment involves a squirming duffle bag in his trunk. Breaking Rule Number Three, he reluctantly opens the package and finds a hottie (Shu Qui). Standing up we can see she weighs about as much as a sack of groceries, and soon the two of them are fending off swarms of bad guys who want her back. Why they put her in a duffle bag is never really explained, nor why they couldn’t transport her themselves, since after they kidnap her from Statham they seem perfectly able to do so, nor is it made clear why they must protect her in later scenes but are more than happy to empty 5,000 rounds of ammunition into the house where’s she hiding, as well as three big boom-booms from a missile launcher. And it is 5,000 rounds, because Statham’s police inspector friend tells him so later.
None of that matters. What matters in “The Transporter” are the fights, which exist at a pitched level of insanity in which wave after wave of bad guys come charging at Our Guy, only to have the tar smacked out of them. He uses not just his fists and his feet but a bicycle, his sweater, a parachute, hurls a tire iron through the window of a moving car, and at one point, in which I was blind with laughter, he engages them while they’re all covered in motor oil. “The Transporter” is a movie where the bad guys come at him first with fists, then with knives and fire axes and metal bars, then finally with their guns. Lucky for Our Guy “The Transporter” is also one of those movies where a two-by-four, or maybe a baseball bat, is always within arm’s reach, just lying around. All this culminates in a mountainside car chase in eighteen-wheelers that virtually recreates the famous pursuit from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”