The horror. The horror. The horror.

     What seems to have a great story with an enticing plot in the beginning goes desperately wrong after the first twenty minutes. The Transporter is nothing short of a failure, which ends up being one of the worst movies of the year. The first scenes have the catchy flair of xXx, and are quite good, I admittedly was hooked; but somewhere in the middle of it all the would-be motion picture event turns into a scummy little kung-fu disaster. We don’t see an ounce of good acting, except for Jason Statham’s acceptable performance. And to add another con to the already giant list, the casting directors choose actors who could barely speak English. The direction was terrible, the camera angles make us sick, and the production is horrific. The film is as funny as Kung Pow to watch, but there is one problem; it’s not supposed to be a comedy. I wanted to scream at how bad it was, after the first hour, the entire piece lost any sense of respect I had earlier had for it.

     Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is a man who will transport you, or any possession ypu have, in exchange for cash, no questions asked. As long as he has the perfect dimensions, weight and quantity of the people or objects you are transporting, he can get away from any person or force, and get everything to the place where you want it to be, on schedule, following an estimated time limit he provides his customers with. He has a set of rules that must not be violated, two of the most important are numbers two and three, no names are exchanged throughout his dealings and that he will not look inside of his customers packages. For years he had been strict to his rules, and had never broken one of them, but curiosity took its toll when a tote-bag he was transporting started moving. When he opened it up, he finds a Chinese woman inside. At first, she tries to run, but he catches up to her quickly and stuffs her back into the trunk of his car as if nothing has happened. When he delivers her to the address he was provided, things get messy, and he sees that she is going to be tortured. He decides to save her, and she chooses to stay at his house. The two fall deeply in love, or at least he falls deeply in love with her, she goes with it for the sake of getting something that she wants accomplished, and he is the only one who has the physical power to do so. Up to this point in the flick, I was prepared to give it a passing grade because it held my interest, but then things turn into some weird type of a foreign filmmaking extravaganza. If you’ve just heard all of the fun parts from me, then why see the entire movie?

     The direction is sloppily done and busily cut, which is not in the least bit exciting. Oriental filmmakers have some weird vision in their heads, telling them that if they cut a movie so you can barely see anything that happens, then it will some how cover up all of the errors. This works occasionally, but the terrible acting here is much too noticeable to try to hide, because everyone is horridly wicked in the way they go about their roles. At the beginning, Jason Statham is good, but after that, just like the rest of the film; his performance plummets and is unable to capture what Vin Diesel did in the similar xXx. Though he was pretty bad, he wasn’t the worst of all; that title goes to Qi Shu, who plays Lai, the woman who is “transported” to evil men. The first of many problems I have with her is that she can barely speak English, some of her lines are even in Chinese, but we don’t get any subtitles to accompany them. Many people say she’s cute, but I find her to be repulsive looking from head to toe. Not much better is the actor who plays her father, Ric Young, who made me want to laugh. His character is hilarious, though he is supposed to be the most serious of all. When he tries to look mad, it’s sad how funny the end result turns out to be. 

     I can officially announce that The Transporter is the most pointless film of the year. Terrible performances, direction that will make you sick, and an ugly sense of style make it far less than a treat to watch. With the absence of the first twenty minutes, which earn it the one bucket that it rightfully deserves, there is absolutely no point to seeing it. I am not able to say this about many movies that come around, but I can deem this one painful to watch. Unless you would like to be hit over the head with mindless stupidity for multiple times, look elsewhere, far elsewhere.

-Danny, Bucket Reviews