Eye Candy #181 - "The Transporter 3"

The Transporter 3: For those that have witnessed the first two entries into the series, this is the wonderful think piece you were expecting. Worse than #1, better than #2, “The Transporter 3” seems a return to form, with Jason Statham as the transporter Frank Martin, hustling (yet again) a young woman across some of the finer parts of eastern Europe in his souped-up Audi. Co-starring with him as “the young woman” is Natalya Rudakova, who was literally discovered on the street by co-screenwriter Luc Besson in New York City and given acting lessons before casting. What they don’t tell you is that the lessons must have ended about 15 minutes before her first day of shooting and that she’s GODAWFUL and delivers her English dialogue like she just spent a quick and dirty 15 minutes with an English-to-Russian dictionary (one memorable line, when Frank refuses her sexual advances: “You‘re the gay!”). In fact, the only reason it seems Besson wanted to cast her is that she looks vaguely/in a dark room/to drunk people like his ex-wife Milla Jovovich from “The Fifth Element”. Some great car stunts performed by Michele Julienne (of the “Remy Julienne and his suicidal son Michele” automotive stunt team) and boy! do they do terrible things to that beautiful car. The ample amount of fisticuffs and plain logic-defying plotholes, this time involving environmental polluters kidnapping a Ukrainian minister’s daughter and strapping a bomb to her wrist so that should she ever leave said Audi, she will go boom. And of course, while transporting this woman from to gunfight to kung-fu fight back to gunfight, she falls for him. Worse part of the film? The trailer for “Crank 2” at the beginning. Woodchuck sez, “Exactly what you were expecting.”