The Transporter Refueled

While Jason Statham might not possess incredible acting, he's a great fit for Transporter. He looks suave and confident, more importantly he looks capable in action sequences. Ed Skrein only amounts to carbon copy lookalike with accent.

Considering it's now stuck with poorly edited choreography for the scuffle, there's barely a trail of usual high octane ride. However, the worst offender is the awful script, bordering on cheap fantasy or softcore porn, the fact that it quotes The Three Musketeers so often is a literature travesty.

A group of prostitutes concocts a ridiculously intricate plan to topple their mafia boss. The Transporter is caught up in the struggle and forced to help them. Story relies on blind luck, coincidences, characters' stupidity and baseless arbitrary events. In other words, it's a complete and utter mess. Forget coherency or plausibility, the movie plays by its own faulty logic.

Unfortunately, the usual captivating fights or engaging chases are nowhere to be found. The movie opts for terrible editing and epileptic camera work instead. It's actually sad that the quirky yet brutal fighting scenes are replaced with such poor production. At the very least previous Transporters' fight is over-the-top fun, this is just confusingly bland.

Script is so awful, almost everything they say sound like 80's macho gibberish, one-liner from porn parody or silly used car commercial. I've high tolerance for cheesy lines, but when the characters literally pose for camera every five minutes to utter these insanely ludicrous lines, it's not even funny anymore.

Like before, Transporter must have damsel-in-distress, now it thinks a group of these attractive ladies would replace narrative. Audience might get juvenile guilty pleasure from the these blond short bob misses with minimal dress or a couple of nifty chases, but these gimmicks are shallow and the best they could do is slightly boost the movie rating if one is generous enough in reviewing it.

With the amount of plot holes and poor choreography it must go through, the end product is unrecognizable wreckage.

The Good: Exciting car chase sequences, eventhough it sort of mimics the Fast Furious series. Ray Stevenson's Frank Martin Sr. steals the show. The Not-so-Good: Ed Skrein doesn't exudes the charm of Jason Statham's, which is one of the signature of the series. Thus he couldn't carry the movie on his own. Some of the fight sequences feel stilted and not as smooth as Transporter series' trademark. No chemistry between Frank and Anna, thus the feeling between them isn't too believable. Once again, Russian are stereotyped as bad guys.

One man's trash, another man's treasure and all that, scavengers rummaging through garbage are always optimistic about finding something of value. Not here. Before I begin to hack this film to pieces (to find anything of value of course), let's start with an old school adage – Point blame at someone and there's always three fingers pointing back at you. In relating that saying to this fourth installment of The Transporter franchise, as long as cinema goers are dumb enough to pay hard earned money to watch just about anything, then absolute junk will be recycled over and over again. For The Transporter Refueled, that's just the outer layer of decomposition.

With none of the cast and crew from the previous films, Refueled runs on fumes even before it goes into first gear. Replacing Jason Statham as the titular protagonist, Ed Skrein's Frank Martin often says "buckle up". Problem is, the film doesn't budge past the first gear and neither does the Audi A8 that replaces the BMW 7-series, the Mercedes S-class or the Lamborghini Murciélago from the previous films. Very early in the film, the Audi does a cool trick until it immediately dawns on you that a Pontiac Trans Am called "Kitt" did this trick over thirty years ago. And while the previous films were an exhibition of brawn over brain, this pathetic excuse of an action film has neither, nor does it seem to care. Somewhere between an elaborate plan where prostitutes revolt against their pimps, the so called action consists of hand-to-hand combat and three car chases. Blink and you'll miss the third chase – Martin on a jetski versus the villain in a Mercedes G-class…on land! Equally cringe worthy is the father-son bonding (Ray Stevens as Martin's dad) which is as effective as securing a square peg in a round hole. Dig deeper and you'll find that Refueled is not only poorly scripted, acted and directed to such an appalling extent, it's very making is a blatant insult to anyone paying to watch this film. But if you do watch this garbage, don't say I didn't warn you.

If you can sit through it, the stench of vomit lasts about 90 minutes. Unfortunately, cinemas don't come with barf bags like airplanes do, so passing your popcorn bucket to the next person is the only way viewers can relieve themselves of nausea. On the positive side, it must be noted that there's hope for film school rejects. If anything, Refueled is a classic example that any Tom, Dick and Harriet can make a movie. I can just imagine the hiring notice for the fifth film - Apply within, no skill required.

Quick background: I like Jason Statham, I thought the first two transporter movies were awesome, but the third one was a let down. And this fourth attempt (without him) is just like the last one. I saw it in the cinema because there wasn't much else going on action wise. So I would only recommend this is if you have ran out of options. I don't think it is as bad as some have put it, as it does have some action, although the fighting leaves much to be desired and doesn't come close to JS skills. And to make it worse, some of it has been hidden! They tried to make up for it all with lots of beautiful women, and it may have worked a little.

In summary, it's just an OK action movie. I wish JS got his act together and made another proper one.

Ed Skrein doesn't hold a candle to Jason Statham in this role, try though he might. The actual plot is not too bad, with I wouldn't say twists and turns, but maybe the odd curved ball, to keep the viewer interested. Many of the stunts are pretty good. Some of the acting, though, is atrocious.