The lovely Qi Shu and some guy who starred in the movie
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05/27/2003 Archived Entry: ""
THE SUM OF THE PARTS WERE MORE THAN THE WHOLE: Monday night movie at Fort Sinatra, aka Steve's casa and let's see what we have here. Charismatic leading man in Jason Statham. Check. Babe hotter than magma two miles below the Earth's surface in Qi Shu. Check. Guns? Check. Fight sequences? Check. Name of movie? The Transporter.
It was definately a case of the sum of the parts totalling more than the movie's worth. The plot, if you can call it that, was written on onion paper and served to tie the fight scenes together. In fact, I'd keep cutting it up but someone from Victoria, British Columbia gave a pretty accurate roundup of the movie's problems. Well, I could be too hard on the movie...it was hardly the worst thing I've ever seen and the soundtrack was wicked good (especially Fighting Man by DJ Fone and Drixxxe -- you heard it when Statham's character breaks into Wall Street's home).
Replies: 6 comments
I saw it over the weekend too. No, you aren't being too hard on it.
Posted by Jeremy Lott @ 05/27/2003 12:42 AM EST
A movie starring Qi Shu needs a plot? Damn... I must have missed that memo. :-)
Posted by W. James Antle III @ 05/27/2003 12:50 AM EST
They could have at least pretended to have a plot. Qi Shu wasn't onscreen that often :-)
Posted by Steve Martinovich @ 05/27/2003 01:58 AM EST
Actually, you know what really disappointed me? It was the fact that Statham's character started out interesting -- iron clad rules, fewer spoken words the better -- and ended up as a mere action figure.
Take another movie that Luc Besson was involved in, one I also own on DVD and love: The Professional. In that, Jean Reno's character started out the same way but Besson managed to slowly build that character so you actually felt for this man. He was a cold-blooded killer (albeit he wouldn't kill women or children) but he was also very lonely. The introduction of a young girl in his life upsets his carefully ordered regime as Qi Shu did to Statham's character but unlike The Transporter, The Professional didn't lapse into action tom-foolery, it explored (to a certain extent) who Reno's character was and the nature of the relationship between that character and Natalie Portman's Mathilda.
At the end of The Professional there's a sort of resolution for Portman's character through the last actions of Reno's character. It didn't weaken the strength of his character but rather made him human. At the end of The Transporter we're left with someone less human than we started with.
This is way too much discussion from me for a mediocre movie...
Posted by Steve Martinovich @ 05/27/2003 02:45 AM EST
Speaking of Reno, Wasabe is no Crimson Rivers which was no Leon.
Posted by oj @ 05/27/2003 06:16 PM EST
A lot of people diss Leon/The Professional because they look at it as a poor man's version of La Femme Nikita. While I enjoyed LFN, I thought The Professional worked. Could Besson have dealt with the uncomfortableness of Mathilda wanting to be a hitwoman and only being 12 years of age? Sure...for the most part he did gloss over that.
Posted by Steve Martinovich @ 05/28/2003 12:02 AM EST