The Transporter (2002) and The Transporter 2 (2005)
- adamsoverduereview
- 7 days ago
- 14 min read
The Transporter 2 was picked for the Fridays of Fury Action Club, see upcoming movies and join the fun here. This is going to be a combination review for The Transporter (2002) and The Transporter 2 (2005), because comparing the two is necessary to figure out why I found part 2 so disappointing 20 years ago and today.
The Transporter came from both a new director and an established veteran. Louis Leterrier, an assistant and commercial director working under producer/writer Luc Besson, was credited as “Artistic Director” in the North American release (presumably because he was an unknown first time feature director) and the primary director in Europe. Meanwhile Hong Kong legend Cor(e)y Motherfuckin’ Yuen (She Shoots Straight) was credited as the primary director in North America and got a “Fight Choreographer” credit in Europe. The second movie gave sole directing credit to Leterrier, although Yuen got a martial arts choreographer credit and did some second unit directing. There is also a separate fight choreographer credited for reshoots on part 2, and it was Cyril Raffaeilli, star of parkour-sploitation classic District B13 (2004)!
The Transporter felt like both a breath of fresh air and a bit of old school fun when I saw it as a teenager in 2002. Over the course of the 90s, action movies had moved towards high-concept, special effects based action. There was also a change in leading men, moving away from the impossible muscles of Schwarzenegger and Stallone or the martial arts roots of Van Damme or Seagal. Instead we saw more movie stars like Tom Cruise and Nicolas Cage taking the leads in action epics. Arguably the only real “action star” to emerge from the decade was Keanu Reeves, and it took three huge hits over the course of the decade (Point Break, Speed, The Matrix) and his dedication to martial arts training on The Matrix to fully win people over (and then a decade+ later, motherfuckers acted like they forgot about Neo until his John Wick resurgence fully cemented his action legend status). Sly and Arnie started taking more non-action roles in between uneven action roles. When I yawned my way through Arnie listlessly fighting the devil in End of Days just a few months after I had been blown away by The Matrix, it really felt like shit was over for the “old era.” Van Damme and Seagal stayed the course but saw diminishing box office and budgets that would land them in Direct-to-Video purgatory by the early 00s. Van Damme was ahead of the curve in bringing Hong Kong talent to his movies, though, as more directors and crew started making inroads in Hollywood before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.
So by the time The Transporter was released, mid-budget meat and potatoes action flicks were a lot harder to come by in America. Thanks to Leterrier, producer/writer Luc Besson, and his company Europacorp, it felt slick and modern. Thanks to Yuen’s fight choreography, it had the hard-hitting quality and creativity of his older Hong Kong flicks, which still felt new in a Western movie. Wire-fu from Yuen Woo-Ping (no relation to Corey) had powered The Matrix (and Woo-Ping's brother’s work on Charlie’s Angels), but The Transporter offered more grounded brawls. The paper-thin story and characterization felt straight out of an 80s action flick. Frank Martin does a dangerous job that he is very good at, ends up having to fight a bunch of bad guys after a job gone wrong. No macguffins, no sci-fi conceits, no attempts at meta or winking at the audience. The screenplay is knowingly dumb, but not in a “can you believe this shit?” way as much as a “who cares about characterization or a few plot holes, get to the next fight scene!” way. And crucially, Frank was played by Jason Statham.
Statham’s first role was in Guy Richie’s British crime flick turned international hit Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He was hired to play streetwise con-man Bacon based on his past as a market stall vendor selling knock-off goods. Richie’s next film Snatch was an even bigger hit, with another prominent role for Statham. From there he got gigs in Hollywood movies Ghosts of Mars and The One. He plays cops or soldiers in both, but neither gave any indication that he would become a leading man of action. The Transporter took the confidence and charisma of his Richie roles, and added kicking. The big surprise was how good at the kicking Statham was (or possibly how good he looked with his shirt off). Statham had been practicing multiple martial arts as a hobby since his youth. He had also been a model and a swimmer and a diver, competing as part of England’s national diving team in 1990.
Seeing Statham throw hands and feet in the movie’s first big fight was a wonderful surprise, and he benefited immeasurably by having Corey Yuen choreograph and capture his moves for his action lead debut. At the time I didn’t know Yuen by name, but I was familiar with his game. One of my earliest exposures to high-flying Hong Kong action was The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk (1993), directed by Yuen and starring Jet Li. I had caught most of it and been blown away during an IFC or Sundance channel free weekend in the late 90s, the same place I caught my first tastes of Hong Kong classics The Killer and Heroic Trio. Corey Yuen had recently been working on Jet Li’s Western films and the first X-Men (2000) doing fight choreo, but The Transporter was his most prominent credit so far outside of Hong Kong.
I was a fan of Statham based on the Richie movies, and assumed he would go on to a solid character actor career. Between his strong accent, somewhat late acting start (in his early 30s), and receding hairline, I did not think Hollywood had a place for him as a leading man. But this, The Transporter’s combination of attitude, ass-kicking, and looking sharp in a suit, THIS he could do. And obviously others agreed, because Statham would end up being one of the few mainstream action stars to emerge from the 00s, alongside Dwayne “still The Rock then” Johnson and Vin Diesel. The Rock was more of an Arnie-type, improbably huge and bending most roles to his persona, but instead of building that persona and fame with bodybuilding followed by iconic movie roles (like Arnie in the 80s), The Rock did it with wrestling and then forgot to book any iconic roles. Whereas Vin Diesel was like the meathead D&D nerd version of Sly, forcing his way into Hollywood as a writer/director/star and then producing and shepherding his own passion projects and franchises over decades (even when he seemed to be the only person interested in them). We saw some other great talents emerge in this time, but Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White and others were unfortunately not headlining theatrical movies.
Statham offered an appealing fusion of the 80s and 90s action model. His swimmer’s body plus some added bulk looked formidable, but not as preposterous as the popping pectorals of prime Sly or Arnie. Statham came off better fighting than the dedicated actors, and he came off better acting than the dedicated fighters. That is not something most of his later action movies took advantage of, though, as he would go on to fill a variety of fairly undemanding “dad action” roles. Statham has remade Charles Bronson (The Mechanic), Burt Reynolds (Wild Card), starred in a script Stallone wrote for himself that could have also been an 80s Chuck Norris role (Homefront), and these days he’s basically making more competent and stylish Steven Seagal movies (The Beekeeper, The Working Man). When Stallone needed someone under 60 to do the heavy lifting for his 80s nostalgia-sploitation series The Expendables, Statham was a smart choice that had both a built-in younger audience and was accepted by the older crowd. I will be honest, I think the first Transporter is still the most I have ever enjoyed seeing the Stath-man in action. I haven’t watched every Statham movie, so maybe there is some hidden gem I have missed (let me know!), but this still has Statham's most dynamic, energetic, and exciting fights for me.
The bare bones plot and spotty script of The Transporter follow professional courier Frank Martin as he lives and works in France. He always follows a strict set of rules, except when he doesn’t. He’s the kind of character who is presented as an ultra-precise badass within the text of the movie, but seems a bit ridiculous and not so great at his job based on what the audience actually sees. The movie kicks into gear after he opens one of his packages and discovers the beautiful Lai Kwai, played by Shu Qi (Martial Angels) bound and gagged. Frank still delivers her, but customer Darren “Wall Street” Bettencourt (the wonderfully reptilian Matt Schulze, Blade and Blade II) realizes he opened the bag and plants a bomb in Frank’s car. Frank survives (unlike the two unconscious cops who were in his trunk), and immediately seeks revenge.
This leads to one of my favorite series of movie edits of all time. It cuts from the explosion sending Frank flying, to inside the mansion where he dropped off Lai when the doorbell rings. One of Wall Street’s henchmen looks through the peephole, and Frank comes flying towards the peephole/camera and kicks the door down on the guy. He then proceeds to kick the absolute shit out of everyone inside, and by the end of this scene I was sold on both the movie and Statham as an action star.
Frank ends up taking Lai home with him. She provides an alibi when far too friendly Inspector Tarconi comes to lightly question Frank about his exploded car and the dead cops inside. She also discovers Frank’s backstory box, revealing he was a special ops soldier. A better action movie would have a “Just how badass is he?” (phrase copyright Outlaw Vern) bit of establishing dialogue, but it's efficient. Immediately after Tarconi leaves, goons shoot up Frank’s villa and he and Lai escape via a bit of underwater diving (one of writer/producer Besson’s passions, he made a whole film about free diving, The Big Blue). Then Lai takes her clothes off and offers Frank some reward sex.
Lai’s character is another element that feels (for better or worse) very 80s action. Shu Qi had been acting for 7 years, across dozens of films. She had started in Category III sex comedies, but by this time she was established enough that she had co-starred with Jackie Chan (Gorgeous, 1999) and starred in an award-winning internationally acclaimed arthouse drama (Millennium Mambo, 2001). However, she spoke very little English when she was cast in The Transporter, and had to learn most of her lines phonetically. That means she was cast primarily for her appearance (those pouty lips!) and international appeal, with acting skills factoring a distant third at best.
Her character exists as an accessory and a plot device, seemingly recovering from a traumatic kidnapping quickly enough to bang Frank. But wait, it turns out that it wasn’t the old “reward sex” trope, it was the old “manipulation sex” trope, so she could try and convince him to help rescue her family and other human-trafficking victims from her cartoonishly evil human-trafficking-loving father (Ric Young) and Wall Street! Human traffickers were a smart choice for eminently hateable villains in an era where audiences were slightly less enthused about watching action heroes kill random street thugs, foreign armies, or terrorists. They would go on to feature as villains in many more action vehicles (including Europacorp’s own Taken series) and real-life conspiracy theories over the following decades.
There are more questionable/half-assed plot beats, all to propel Frank into more action scenes. At one point, the henchmen are told to take Frank alive, which makes no sense except to take guns off the table so we can get more hand-to-hand melees (expediency over logic again!). Incidentally, I was slightly disappointed by the lack of gun-fu when I saw this in 2002 because the poster showed Frank dual wielding pistols John Woo-style, but that never bothered me on repeat viewings. The most memorable scene in the movie (and possibly Statham's career) is a brawl where Frank ends up shirtless in a big puddle of motor oil.
He greases himself up, sticks some bicycle pedals on his feet for traction, and then kicks the shit out the slipping and sliding goons trying to grab him. It is the perfect combination of creativity and ridiculousness that I truly love in an action movie, and probably helped make Statham a sex symbol for many of the gays and the girlies in the audience (it started my wife’s crush on the Stath-man, at least).
The climax sees Frank parachuting onto one of the two semi-trucks hauling Lai’s family and other victims in trailers, and fighting Wall Street in the cab of one of the trucks. This scene best illustrates the slapdash storytelling of the whole affair, with a plothole that stuck out to me even as a stoned teenager. The entire sequence makes it clear there are TWO semi-trucks full of victims in a convoy with multiple cars/SUVs following, with Frank landing on the rear truck. Throughout his fight with Wall Street we continue to see shots that show the other truck ahead of them. Then after Frank throws Wall Street out of the truck (and under the tires in the international/uncut version), he IMMEDIATELY pulls onto an off-ramp and parks somewhere so the movie can get to his showdown with Lai’s father. The second truck disappears completely and is never mentioned again, lucky for Frank and Lai he picked the truck with her family! Obviously this whole movie is dumb as rocks, so it isn’t going to ruin the action that preceded it, but it always bothered me. It could have been easily (if lazily) addressed by adding an ADR line when the cops show up, where either Frank tells them about the other truck or they say they already stopped it or something. The directors, editors, producers, etc.all must have watched this movie multiple times throughout the editing/post process, and either none of them cared enough about the story to notice and add some ADR, or they assumed the audience wouldn’t care enough about the story to notice. Considering no one I have ever brought this plot hole up to knew what I was talking about, I guess they were right.
I thought the first movie was a step in the right direction for East/West action fusion, old school action and new school cool. Needless to say, I was excited for the sequel. The Transporter 2 (2005) ended up being a huge disappointment for me. Rewatching the first movie now, I liked it a little less than I used to, so I thought maybe my opinion on part 2 might soften in comparison. Not much, unfortunately. It doesn’t actively piss me off anymore because I am not an overly opinionated 20 year old, but it is still pretty sucky outside of a few brief fight highlights.
The premise feels like something that should have come in a later sequel when they were running out of ideas. Frank has taken a temporary gig as a driver/bodyguard job for a “cute” kid as a favor to a friend (note: the kid actor isn’t bad, the character just sucks and based on how bad he is at Frank’s guessing game he is kind of stupid). Some bad guys try to inject the kid with a deadly virus and Frank interferes, so they force him to kidnap the kid for them as part of an overly complicated but uninteresting plot for them to infect the kid’s dad (Matthew Modine as a Senator and Drug Czar) and by extension a bunch of international anti-drug officials. One sequel in and it already takes Frank out of his interesting underworld occupation to be a generic bodyguard/hero. It softens any edge or moral ambiguity he had by making him pals with the kid, and then immediately willing to risk his life to help the kid in a plot Frank innocently wandered into. It raises the stakes from saving a few hundred trafficked people that would go unnoticed if Frank didn’t save them to an international drug cartel and bio-weapon conspiracy that will kill world leaders.
Master cocksman (phrase copyright Nathan Rabin) Frank won’t even bang the kid’s mom, a divorcee he is attracted to, just because she shows up a little drunk. I don’t know if that even counts as chivalrous, considering she is a grown-ass woman a year into an unhappy divorce with an obvious crush on Frank. He is supposed to leave the job soon and never see her again, so she has some drinks for courage and makes her move, what’s wrong with that? Remember that last time around Frank didn’t have any problem sexing up a younger woman he had just met/trafficked who was in a disadvantaged position and had just survived multiple traumatic situations. So why can’t wine mom get her some? The bit at the end of the movie where he brings her flowers, but walks away when he sees her briefly getting along with her ex-husband and their child is a final facepalm. Frank seems more invested in getting this unhappy relationship back together than their couples therapist or the Senator’s PR team would be.
The whole thing feels somehow both sillier and more serious than the first movie, to its detriment. Instead of the first movie’s opening showing how cold and calculating Frank can be during the robbery, he gets randomly accosted by a Maxim model in a schoolgirl outfit and her cartoonish gang of stereotypes, who offer no challenge or excitement in a brief fight. Before we even see Frank’s new gig he seems softer, as he tells the girl to run off back to school or whatever (because obviously the white girl in the group doesn’t belong with all these “thugs” and deserves a second chance!). The music, editing, and plot all want to be taken seriously. The first movie’s soundtrack was the kind of terribly generic hip-hop/techno music that plagued action films at the turn of the century. This time it is replaced with an equally generic serious action score. This is the only case where I would say the movies are even. The Transporter 2 also has the over-graded orange and teal look that permeated 00s action, although at the time I had not grown sick of it and it at least works for the Miami setting. Directing and editing also feel choppier this time. Some of the era’s shaky-cam has started to creep into the fight scenes. CGI is used more for both car chases and fights, as Frank’s driving and fighting skills become more superhuman.
The new bad guy probably gets more screentime and dialogue than Wall Street did, but isn’t as memorably slimy and doesn’t have Wall Street’s kicking skills to provide satisfying showdowns with Frank. His girlfriend/minion spends most of the movie in lingerie or in wet lingerie wielding submachine guns. The character and actress are giving generic killer chick with nothing extra to make her fun or memorable, and she is a walking example of one of my least favorite eras of “hot chick,” when that meant being as skinny and blonde as possible. My wife also mentioned that sexless/shirt-full Statham was less appealing than the first movie.
There is a decent amount of action in The Transporter 2, but somehow the distribution and pacing feels off. The first one moved so fast that it felt like pages of script or story beats were skipped over, whereas this one draaaags between fights. I hated the magic car physics and CGI back in 2005 (a precursor to latter day Fast and Furious movies). I still don’t like it, but I can also acknowledge now that the first one’s more practical car chase isn’t particularly exciting either. Maybe I would be able to look past some of this if part 2 delivered a couple of banger fight scenes like part 1, but even there it is lacking. Frank’s fight against the big guy he drops a boat on is fun and has clever environment work, but it's over quickly. Later, the back half of the movie’s biggest brawl provides some excitement with improvised weapon/environment work (always a Corey Yuen strength) as Frank beats and binds mooks with a firehose, but once again it's over too soon. Those were literally the only two stand out moments I remembered from 20 years ago, and they are still the only moments that stand out for positive reasons on rewatch.
I saw The Transporter 3 when it was released in 2008, but considering all I remember from that one is extreme BMX biking and Frank somehow breathing oxygen from car tires I don’t think I will be revisiting it. The Statham-less 2015 reboot movie and 2012 TV series didn’t look particularly appealing, so I skipped them. There is more Transporter-adjacent action available, though. The Transporter was originally inspired by an advertising campaign. In 2001-2002, BMW commissioned a series of short films under the name The Hire. They featured Clive Owen as an expert driver taking on various high risk jobs in BMWs, each short from a different director (ranging from established legends like Johns Woo and Frankenheimer to then up and comers like Joe Carnahan and Guy Richie). They vary in quality, but are worth seeking out on youtube if you have never watched them before.
The Transporter movies also ended up inspiring other appearances or characters. Statham cameoed in Collateral (2004) and Letterrier said it was Frank Martin. Statham did a 2024 advertising campaign for the Volkswagen Transporter van. Various shows and movies have also riffed on the character, with my favorite being the underseen Cinemax TV series Banshee. In season 2, episode 6, antihero protagonist Hood (a pre-Homelander Anthony Starr) faces off with a guy who has come to abduct someone and Transport them back to his employers (via the trunk of his car). Quentin (Andrew Howard) just happens to be a badass British gentleman in a nice suit with a familiar hairline, incredible fight skills, and some kind of warrior/criminal code of honor. SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER CONTINUED
He also gets decapitated by a semi-truck before the episode is over, because Banshee doesn’t fuck around! Shit, I should watch Banshee again. Everyone should watch Banshee, that show fights and fucks more than a drunk sailor.
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