![]() “Fifteen years later” the next title card tells us, though the prevalence of the latest tablet computers and smartphones – which the camera lingers on for product placement purposes – suggests otherwise. “Tell them I now run the prostitution business,” he tells a fleeing survivor. The rest is the usual stuff, and poorly edited, to boot.Īn opening sequence in the French Riviera sets the stage for the action: in 1995, pimp Karasov (Radivoje Bukvić) rides onto a street corner, guns down the competition, and puts his own girl – the frightened, crying Anna (Loan Chabanol) – in their place. Where Statham was lean and compact, Skrein is tall and lanky and skeletal-thin in some of Transporter Refueled’s hand-to-hand combat scenes, he looks like a high school basketball player taking on a bunch of professional wrestlers.īut the film’s best action scene takes advantage of this: in a too-narrow office corridor, Skrein’s Frank Martin has an advantage over his beefy counterparts, and easily dispatches them by opening and closing the doors on file cabinets that flank him.įor all the other action scenes in the film – gunfights and knifefights and fistfights, chases on land, sea, and air (well, almost) including one where the titular character drives into and through a crowded airport terminal – that file cabinet takedown was the lone memorable set piece. Producer-writer Luc Besson has been churning out these things by the year (see also: Brick Mansions, Colombiana, From Paris with Love), employing a mostly French-speaking crew and cast (some of whom are horribly dubbed here) and an international star or two to appeal to English-speaking audiences.īut Statham said no to this outing, and the replacement star is… Ed Skrein? You might know him as Daario Naharis in Game of Thrones – at least, for the three episodes he played that character before he was replaced. Those movies starred Jason Statham, and like the Taken series, returned modest profits on modest budgets. Refueled, retooled, and rebooted: I’m not so sure the Transporter franchise required a remake, but here’s one that makes the original three films look like paragons of action filmmaking by comparison.
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