Steering Contest

James Bond can’t stop brooding about his dead lover to savour even a moment of joy as travels around the world, driving fast cars in the company of beautiful women. Jason Bourne is tortured by nightmarish memories of the identity that the CIA erased from his mind. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has had his career derailed by too many spy spoofs and family comedies. Jean-Claude Van Damme has no money and has lost custody of his children. Steven Seagal is fat. Arnold Schwarzenegger is old. Clint Eastwood is really old.

No, the only action star who seems to be enjoying himself these days is Jason Statham, and nowhere more so than in his two turns as all-business driver-for-hire Frank Martin in the two Transporter movies — soon to be joined by a third, directed by the awesomely named Olivier Megaton. I haven’t seen Transporter 3, but having just spent a night catching up with the first two entries in the series, I can’t wait for #3 — written, like the first two, by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, and this time featuring Prison Break scene-stealer Robert Knepper as the villain. The lead actress is someone named Natalya Rudakova; I haven’t seen any pictures of her, but if the first two pictures are anything to go by, her accent will be exotic, her lips will be pouty, and her legs will be approximately nine feet long. Not counting the stilettos.

I’m sure Jason Statham can handle her. One of the great moments in The Transporter comes when Frank discovers that the package he’s been hired to deliver is a beautiful Asian woman (Shu Qi). Against his better judgment — one of his ironclad personal rules is “Never look in the package” — he lets her take a bathroom break by the side of the road. She takes the opportunity to escape down the hill and into some dense underbrush, but Frank soon recaptures her — and just when you’re wondering how the hell he’s going to drag this woman all the way back up the hill, Statham simply lifts her onto his shoulders and effortlessly carries her up back to his car. It’s the most graceful act of Neanderthalism you’ve ever seen in your life. (When Frank finally gets her back to his place, his house is every bit the masculine dream palace you’d hope it would be: a big, square cottage in the French countryside with a large, immaculate garage, a kitchen where the only gadgets are a microwave and a good coffeemaker, and a secret exit in the cellar that you have to don scuba gear to use. Shu Qi is suitably awed, and immediately gets to work baking madeleines in the kitchen and throwing herself at Statham in the bedroom.)

Corey Yuen, a veteran Asian actor, director, and fight choreographer, directed The Transporter, and he gives the action sequences the playful staging and the physical wit that I associate with the best Hong Kong martial arts pictures. I’m particularly fond of the climactic showdown where Frank has to battle seven or eight bad guys in a garage — he tips a few nearby barrels of oil onto the floor, and then slips a couple of bicycle pedals onto his shoes so that he’s the only guy in the room with any traction. In another scene, Frank literally subdues two attackers with his sweater. (Jason Statham takes his shirt off in every movie he makes — Yuen cleverly finds a way to turn that convention into an excuse for more action.) In scenes like these, Statham combines Daniel Craig’s rough-and-tumble physicality, Roger Moore’s self-deprecating sense of humour, and Pierce Brosnan’s ability to look incredible in a suit and tie.

I was slightly less enamoured of the more cartoonish Transporter 2, in which Frank’s driving and fighting skills go from “expert” to “superhuman.” (In one famously ridiculous scene, Frank removes a bomb from the underside of his car by driving up a ramp, flipping the vehicle in midair, and sailing through the sky at just the right angle so that the bomb winds up getting removed by a metal hook dangling nearby.) With its lean plot and relentlessly single-minded hero, the first Transporter (and I know this comparison is kind of ridiculous, but anyway...) belongs to the tradition of criminal-for-hire movies like Lee Marvin’s Point Blank, but the sequel, with its cockamamie plot about a highly contagious supervirus, is strictly Michael Bay/Joel Silver stuff.

That doesn’t mean it’s not ridiculously entertaining, though — especially the outrageous scenes featuring Kate Nauta as a villainous henchwoman named Lola. Nauta is truly one of the most eye-popping physical presences I’ve ever seen in a movie: freakishly tall, long-limbed, with short blonde hair and seemingly permanent smoky eye makeup, she thinks nothing of walking down the middle of the street in broad daylight, wearing nothing but expensive lingerie, black stockings, and red stilettos, firing a pair of Uzis at a police car. She eventually dies when Statham hurls her against a really pointy piece of modern art hanging on the wall of her lover’s living room. A fitting end — she’s a work of art already.

The Transporter movies aren’t art, of course. They’re just exhilarating trash. But unlike the Bond movies, which now seem faintly embarrassed about their 45-year legacy, they have a clear sense of what they are. They have better music too. You’ll never see Luc Besson fretting about “reconceiving” or “rebooting” the Transporter series or wondering how to make them “relevant” again. He’s too busy devising outlandish scenarios for Frank to kick and/or drive his way out of. Like his hero, he wants to get from Point A to Point B as efficiently and stylishly as possible. Get out of his way.