Ür-text for much of the past decade’s high-flying thrill-rides, with future House of Besson protégés Pierre Morel as Director of Photography, and Louis Leterrier credited as “Artistic Director”, suggesting he did most of the work in marshaling the cast and camera, whilst the film is officially helmed by reputable Hong Kong kick-ass auteur Corey Yuen, who presumably did the heavy lifting in creating this cheerfully absurd series’ distinctive brand of comic-book action. The tone and style does retain something of the brutal but tongue-in-cheek, even innocent flavour of much HK swash’n’buckle. Like its immediate predecessor in Besson’s efforts to invent an internationally-seasoned B-movie kingdom, Kiss of the Dragon (2001), it has the feel of a ‘30s B-quickie infused with the chitinous visual sheen, rocking action, and careless expense of a contemporary blockbuster. The actual story set-up channels ‘70s flicks like The Last Run and French Connection II, but with their noir cool and modish existentialism replaced by pop naïvete and arrow-straight, crowd-pleasing focus.
Jason Statham established firm claim to his status as the supreme action star of the ’00s with his effortless charisma and laid-back grit as antihero Frank Martin, a former military adventurer and disappointed humanitarian who now resides in his customised Monaco villa and specialises in transporting anything – usually shady, like the mob of idiotic bank robbers he picks up at the opening – from Point A to Point B, a kind of FedEx for criminals, whilst maintaining a strict regimen of rules. These rules fall victim to his innate humanism, however, when he’s hired to transport a bound and gagged Chinese girl in a bag, Lai (Shu Qi), incurring the wrath of a gang of ruthless human traffickers run by the cutely named “Wall Street” (Matt Schulze) but also including Lai’s own ruthless father (Ric Young). She’s been trying to throw a spanner in their works, and doesn’t mind spinning a yarn or two to get the taciturn Martin to lend a hand. Aided by amusingly crumpled local cop Tarconi (François Borleand), Statham sets out to save Lai and a container full of imported, slowly suffocating slave labourers in a flashy finale that crossbreeds the conclusion of Licence to Kill with Raiders of the Lost Ark’s immortal desert chase.
Seeing Qi, the luminous star of Hsiao-hsien Hou’s mighty Three Times (2005), in such a context is bewildering, and she reportedly had to learn her dialogue phonetically, but she still brings a spry energy to an underwritten role. Complaining about underwritten anything here is indeed beside the point, in a film that doesn’t give a toss for anything more than maintaining an amusing drive and conjuring dizzying stunts, but the glibness of the story development does rob the film of truly involving impetus. Yuen’s cutting, moreover, is slightly less concussive and not so illustratively well-composed as that which, say, Morel would impose on the later District B13 and Taken, with some brawls rendered slightly too frenetic for maximum amazement in the physical effort, and the project resembles today a first draft for something Besson’s boys would perfect later. Stanley Clarke’s jaunty music score infuses an almost comedic tone.
Still, the action stunts and martial arts are conceived and executed with giddy gusto, showcasing in particular Statham’s excellence as an athlete, full of imaginative and funny flourishes, especially in a set-piece slug-fest where Statham takes on a horde of thugs in a lake of grease, a sequence which confirms the feeling I’ve had for a long time that the real heirs to the slapstick physical tradition of Keaton and Chaplin are in today’s action stars.
Rollerball (1975): Timeless Sci-Fi Classic