Metacritic reviews

The best movie Steven Seagal never made. Except that Statham, while just as marked for death, is harder to kill.

A thoroughly satisfying mix of mayhem and mindless fun.

There's plenty to like here, especially for connoisseurs of the action genre, and there's also plenty to make you wonder whether Besson and co-writer Robert Mark Kamen scribbled their screenplay on a batch of Marseilles cocktail napkins and then lost one or two.

This is a film where there isn't the slightest doubt about the dramatic outcome. But the marketing will be a cliffhanger.

The plot doesn't rate as high as the quality of the bodies in fast, furious motion. What counts in The Transporter isn't the wafer-thin story about smugglers -- it's the way Martin kicks open a door, fends off a couple of axes and uses a perfectly ordinary sport shirt as a weapon.

A slick, sexy little package with fast cars, big explosions, dazzling locations in the south of France, a trip-hop score, and about as much plot to fill a thimble.

If anything, The Transporter isn't ludicrous enough; only one scene (a hand-to-hand showdown in the middle of an oil slick) reaches the inspired, delirious comic heights of the best Hong Kong movies.

So second-hand and disposable is it in every respect.

It takes perverse genius to make an action film this stupid.

That the movie becomes silly isn't necessarily a problem, but it also becomes tiresome, degenerating into a series of martial arts interludes -- everyone unaccountably leaves his guns at home.