First, the good news: according to the previews, Transporter 3 is coming soon.
The bad news is that this remake is not a very good movie. The Pang brothers have remade their 1999 story of lone assassin (is there any other type?), this time with Nicolas Cage in the lead role. In the original, the assassin was deaf-mute; in the remake the love interest is deaf-mute, and how the directors expect to make a love story between an American man and a Thai woman believable when they cannot communicate in any way, is anyone’s guess. In truth, the love story is irrelevant. We are meant to believe that Cage inexplicably grows a heart and a conscience on his final mission, setting aside every rule he has made for himself. In fairness, this is a theme we have seen many times before, but Nicolas Cage is no Chow Yun-Fat.
The action sequences are decent, there are a couple of momments of poetry (particularly a scene where two men try to mug Cage), and the movie even manages to summon up a Hong Kong sensibility at the very end as Cage sits in a car and contemplates his own death. But Cage is not given enough to do. He alternates between cold hitman and goofy tourist, with nothing in between. A waste.
Cage’s increasingly bizarre hairpiece is no help either.
I think that hairpiece roams about of its own freewill, eating crumbs cached in small pockets of craggy Cage flesh. I swear I saw it sitting just above his left shoulder-blade on E! the other evening….
bomb