The Transporter 3 (2008)

This third installment finds Frank Martin back living alone in France. The movie opens with him fishing with his old buddy Tarconi. All too soon his peaceful life comes to an end and he finds himself taking a beautiful Ukrainian girl across Europe. Both she and Frank have bracelets attached to their wrists that will explode if they wander too far from the car.

The movie takes far too long getting to the point. Once it does, the entire plot falls apart. Here it goes. The girl is a kidnaped victim. Her father is a high official in Ukraine. Some wealthy, evil American men want her father to sign some papers that would allow them to dump their toxic waste there. He refused, so they kidnaped her as leverage.

Why did the greedy, environmentally uncaring Americans not just leave her in a basement somewhere after they abducted her? Why have her driven all over Europe where she could be spotted by all kinds of people? Why did she never just phone her father and tell him what was going on?

As usual, Frank Martin often finds himself surrounded by a group of men who need their ass kicked. After one particular fight, in which Frank ends up naked from the waist up, Valentina finds herself turned on. The best sexual moment for me in the movie is when he turns down her sexual advances. “You are the gay?” She asks “No, I am not the gay. Did it ever occur to you that I am not in the mood.” Usually men in movies are sexual slaves to any girl who even winks at them. It was unique to see a macho guy turn down sex. Of course they have sex soon afterwards, but it was still nice to see a guy taking charge of his own libido, even if it was temporary.

The sole success of the Transporter movies is Jason Statham. His macho mannerisms and voice make him a likable tough guy without making stupid jokes. Although I was wondering if Olga Kuryenko was too busy filming Quantum of Solace to play the role of Valentine, Rudakova is attractive and unique looking. How often is a red head with a face full of freckles a sex symbol. Even Lindsey Lohan has makeup cover hers.

As a last observation, this movie has Americans as the bad guys. They want to pollute the Ukraine. With all of the Muslims killing people everywhere, in an effort to, yes, take over the world, French screen writer, Luc Besson can only come up with Americans as the bad guys?

Like you say Eric this movie makes absolutely no sense. There's no reason for the villains to use Frank as the driver and by using him they hurt the chances of their plan succeeding. Plus, if the Ukrainian Minister signed the contract for the evil Americans and then they released his daughter why on Earth would he honor the contract? What court on Earth wouldn't excuse him for that after his daughter testified about her kidnapping.

And speaking of not making sense, the villains create this elaborate scheme of putting a bracelet on Frank that will blow up if he goes more than 75 feet from his car, but they don't think to put a remote control on the bomb so that they can blow up it whenever they want? I mean at one point they want Frank dead and they have to approach the car with guns, which allows Frank to escape. If they'd had a remote control they could have killed him with a press of a button.

The only things I really enjoyed about the first two Transporter movies was the action and Jason Statham's performance as the bad-ass driver. This time around the action is lame and filmed badly. Statham looks bored in the part and is given even less to do this time around than before.

The first two movies reminded me of movies based on video games. I'm not sure you could manage to make any kind of interesting or fun game from this mess.