Notes on a Reboot: Transporter Refueled at 8:19 PM

Transporter! More than meets the eye! Not-Jason Statham battles to destroy the evil forces of...stuff?

I have seen Transporter Refueled, yet have no desire for a long review or a run down. Instead, some points of interest.

• There is only one Jason Statham. He's called Jason Statham. This new guy is no Jason Statham. Jason Statham is the last of the dying breed of heavy accented action movie stars in the house of Stallone, Van Damme and Schwartzenegger. This new guys doesn't even  'ave the right awcksent, oi.

• This movie is thankfully not an origin story explaining how Frank got his amazing driving super powers or anything like that. Even though he's younger, and his dad is around, he's already basically already driving stuff without asking about it and having a bunch of rules that he's only had to break every movie. But hey, I know a movie about a man quietly and successfully delivering a box he doesn't get to look at wouldn't be all that great.

• BMW should seriously look at that automatic door opening system. Frank hits a button on the beeper and the doors open violently, knocking around some bad guys. But uh, it really looks like you could hurt a child or pet with that thing.

• The Transporter-Mobile never ever gets even a scratch on it until  Frank blows it up to cover his tracks( and the detonator too for good measure. Frank apparently drives on a carbomb detonated by a beeper-bomb.) It hits a fence at full speed and still looks like it came right off the dealer.

• Speaking of which, a ridiculous  scene has  Frank backwhip a row of water hydrants with a drift on a round-about, causing an asterisk made of water streams that allows him to elude capture. Ok, how many fuckin' fires does that round-about get that it needs more than one, MORE THAN TWO fire hydrants. I'm not even gonna get on how sturdy hydrants are, but my sister stuck a car on top of one and it didn't even wince.

• Frank's dad is the most interesting man in the world. He also winds up becoming a mansel in distress TWICE. Like, he's dropped off from his first kidnapping and immediately Frank gets that call "I've got your father".

• Frank apparently has a big backstory with the bad guy from the movie from the old army days. Older than 1995, where he was already done with whatever army business he had and was already taking over the prostitution business in a whole city.

• Oh, yeah, by stating that  this backstory took place in 95, and that the movies current story took place 15 years later, we can piece together that this movie takes place in 2010, and that, as Frank has yet to lose all his hair, and presumably his old daddy, that those adventures are at least somewhere after the 2020's.

• Also the main badguy's prostition empire, which spans a whole city and he won by shooting a few guys, runs with about a 15 strong, presumably very hard working hookers. This guy is A MILLIONAIRE. From less than 20  prostitutes he dragged into France in 1995. 

• Frank is probably not gay if this movie has anything to say about it. I like the idea of Frank being somewhat impersonal and, to call it something, asexual in his adventures and not hooking up with every woman in his adventures, but I guess that ship sailed already.

• After the final showdown, most of the prostitutes involved in the revenge scheme that runs this movie's plot have died, and the bad guy fakely falls off a cliff after being shot by the last one. My mind wandered for a bit, and when I came too, she was pointing a gun at Frank and wanted to kill him for no real reason.

• While not as ridiculous as other representations of computer and technology, the way bank accounts and money transfers are represented is hilarious. Everyone's face is on the fricking bank account like it's Facebook(yes even the prostitutes have their face in there), and you kind of drag the money from person A to person B. It's like Zynga built a bank app.

• One particularly good scene had Frank shift the car to neutro and let it slowly roll towards the fence as he cleared some badguys  out of the way. It's particularly fun, but it really looked like the car was about to roll into some concrete stuff at one point and then they edited it like, "nope, it was straight the whole time". Yes, there where people inside who could have corrected it, but since the whole scene was about how they DIDN'T know if they should listen to him OR take control of the car, and they never showed them actually steering it, I assume they didn't steer it.

• Perhaps because we might forget this is a Transporter movie, they drop a few old scenes from the other movies in there, like hoodlums trying to steal Frank's Car, and someone disguising themselves as a doctor.

• The whole movie wasn't BAD, per se, as bad goes. But I couldn't help the feeling I was watching like a bad Asylum Knock off of the Transporter series. Like, It had SEEN Transporters and knew to glue some stuff from there, but also wanted other things to fill up the time. The parts that aren't trying to be Transporter Returns are ok. Just ok.