Movie Review 'The Transporter Refueled': Trio of unlikely musketeers

Cast: Ed Skrein, Ray Stevenson, Loan Chabanol, Tatjana Pajkovic, Radivoje Bukvic, Lenn Kudrjawizki
Director: Camille Delamarre
Rating: 2 stars

This reboot of the Transporter series once again finds Frank Martin (played by Ed Skrein, taking over from Jason Statham) delivering packages under his three rules: (a) a deal is a deal, (b) no names are exchanged and, (c) never find out what the package is. Naturally, all three rules are broken after Martin’s client Anna (Loan Chabanol) kidnaps his father (Ray Stevenson) and forces him to help her and her gang of ex-prostitutes (Gabriella Wright, Tatjana Pajkovic, Wenxia Yu) to rob their former pimp, a vile human trafficker called Karasov (Radivoje Bukvic). Frank Martin and his Audi are caught in the middle of a rock and a hard place, as he navigates the girls past several police cars and angry gangsters towards freedom.

The Transporter Refueled has a great deal of resemblance to this year’s best action movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, you have a male hero playing second fiddle to a driven woman who leads other women from the bondage of exploitation to freedom. It is a good example of how a good idea and great concept can be poorly executed. While the hero of Fury Road was relatively marginal, Transporter Refueled makes him feel totally unnecessary. Anna is the hero of the film, the feisty leader and enigmatic femme fatale carries the film on her own without having to play second fiddle to Frank Martin. This, despite the fact that her character is a good step down from Charlize Theron’s charismatic Furiosa. The movie’s studied invocation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers in the film’s dialogue does it no good as the repeated references feel out of place and do little to explain character motivations.

There’s a good deal of hypocrisy in the film’s treatment of human trafficking and prostitution. On one hand the film celebrates its women anti-heroes taking revenge on their abusers and stealing from their pimps. While on the other hand it is framed from Frank Martin’s perspective catering to the male audience with numerous scenes of scantily-clad women. Likewise, the story of women empowerment gets undercut when the hero has to come and rescue the girl and fight for them, to be rewarded for his heroism in bed. Compared to Fury Road’s genuine reversal of conventions in male-female roles in action movies, The Transformer Refueled comes off looking very tame.

Still, the film does have elements that are enjoyable, especially in the first half. It has the breezy pace of a well-made B-movie, in that there’s very little time devoted to get the plot moving. There’s a good sense of suspense and mystery and the action scenes in the first half are more interesting. The performances are highly weak on the whole and Ed Skrein is not an effective substitute for Jason Statham (who did most of his stunts in the first Transporter film). The main fun are the film’s heist sequences which have the girl gang robbing all the gangsters. These are shot and paced well, edited and staged in a way that is convincing and impressive, and one feels that it could have fitted a better and different film than the one we get to see.

— The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society