Here’s a test for you. How many times did you rewind the part in TRANSPORTER 2 where he sees in a reflection that there’s a bomb on the bottom of his car so he drives the car off a pile of junk, flips, successfully hooks the bomb onto a nearby crane and lands the car safely?
If you answered 3 or more, like me, then you will probaly be disappointed in TRANSPORTER 3, like I was. If you prefer part 1 then all bets are off, but me, I’m strictly a part 2 man. The first one had some good action scenes, like the sliding-around-in-oil-on-the-ground fight. But it put too much emphasis on the melodrama. I don’t care how cool he looks in a suit, that’s not gonna make it interesting to hear him keep talking about his fucking “rules.” Oh geez I wonder what would happen if he ever broke one of those rules he won’t fucking shut up about, I guess it’s kind of a moot point though because obviously he would nev– WHUH? He broke his own rules? What’s gonna happen now? We’re through the looking glass, people.
Part 2 was a work of beauty though, a complete re-engineering that chops out everything that was dull and fills the empty space with added awesomeness. They still have the elaborate Hong Kong style fights, they raise the level of preposterous stunts/effects shots, they introduce more colorful characters. They got all kinds of crazy shit: a skeleton thrown at a guy, a firehose as a weapon, a car straddling two buildings. Frank jumps a jetski onto a street, jumps over two colliding cars, has a kickboxing match inside a spinning plane. How many movies have a female assassin in a sexy nurse costume, garters and Tammy Faye style smeared makeup driving a stolen police car? Not many. Later she is impaled on a wall of spikes in her boyfriend’s apartment, which in my opinion was an unsafe thing to have but I guess that’s easy for me to say, I wasn’t there. Hindsight is 20/20. Anyway, the point is that I love unapologetically over-the-top action when it’s well executed, and TRANSPORTER 2 delivers. (more…)
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I gave CRANK two tries. I really wanted to like the movie, but I sort of hated it. I had a hard time getting past the hyperactive editing and camerawork – Jason Statham would do these things that should be exciting but the directors, “Neveldine/Taylor,” were hammering me over the head so hard with all their visual tricks that it just seemed boring. I honestly fell asleep the first time I saw it and missed that charming moment where he causes an innocent cab driver to be lynched by pointing at him and yelling “Al Quaeda!” on a crowded street.
