This 'Transporter' no thrill ride

Jason Statham and Natalya Rudakova. (magali bragard)

Here we are back in the sweaty armpit of a "Transporter" movie. It's installment three, and this time, it's . . . romantic? After years of maintaining his strict code for carrying mysterious, hotly pursued cargo across Europe (no names, no peeking at packages), Jason Statham's indestructible Frank Martin breaks all the rules. Not only does Frank peek at his latest package, he tells it his name then makes love to it.

No one attends a "Transporter" movie to see Statham go wobbly. And were he to wobble, it's crucial that the folks in casting find a woman worth alienating "Transporter" loyalists who've paid to see Statham dance his way through dazzling fight choreography. Certainly they could have done better than Natalya Rudakova, the tall, amazingly freckled block of ludicrousness who spends the movie alternating between Statham's passenger seat and his arms.

For her, we have Luc Besson to thank. Besson co-wrote the movie and has produced all three, and apparently he saw Rudakova walking to work at a New York hair salon and decided he had to have her. Could her sharp orange bob have given Besson a flashback to the haircut his ex-wife Milla Jovovich wore in his space extravaganza, "The Fifth Element"?

Regardless, now she's playing a trashy Ukrainian nightclubber named Valentina. Rudakova proves a capable seductress, a woeful comedian, and a limited conversationalist. Her finest moments involve her being all three at the same: "I want. To feel sex. One more time. Before. I die." Statham obliges but rarely looks happy about it. Frank's assignment is to get the package to its destination in Bucharest (the reasons for the trip remain vague at best, idiotic at worst), not to do a striptease for the package.

Stripteases in these movies are for fight sequences, and in the first "Transporter" (2002) Statham was at the center of several beautiful ones, including an encounter that required him to defend himself while coated in oil. Nothing in this third movie approaches that sequence. The gimmick this time has Frank and Valentina outfitted with chunky metal bracelets rigged to explode if either gets too far from his Audi sedan. (That sounds too much like the gist of "Crank," where Statham's poisoned character dies if his heart rate drops.)

In "Transporter 3," which Olivier Megaton directed, when someone takes off with Frank's car, Statham takes off on a bike that he plows through a warehouse factory then feet-first into the driver-side window. It's easy to applaud a sequence like that (the bike doubles as surfboard!). There's just not enough of it. In the original, the wild physical dynamism and the novelty of seeing Asian stunt choreography performed by a well-dressed (then well-undressed) Englishman were exhilarating; the campy sub-Steven Segal slave-labor plot was pretty enjoyable, too.

Statham owes his career to that movie, and it's understandable that he'd want to please his fans by giving them more. But more with these sequels is always less. The proportions haven't been right since 2002. The thrill of the ridiculousness is gone. So is all the mystery that made Statham so appealing in the first place. If I'm being honest, Frank's disrobing at his package's insistence is sexy. But that he would think once about this obnoxious, pill-popping brat reveals our hero to have less intelligence and worse taste than we ever imagined.