The holiday movie season rolls out with a bang with three films offering truly different themes for your movie-going attention. The pictures are "Transporter 3," "Australia" and "Four Christmases."
His hard and fast rules are: No names, Never ask questions, Never change the plan, and Never look in the briefcase, envelope, drop bag, or whatever it is he's hired to take from Point A to Point B.
The second, less satisfying film in the series made the mistake of forgetting what Martin does best. "Transporter 2" had him in Miami chauffeuring some snot-nosed rich kid who gets kidnapped. It attempted to turn him into a typical action hero. Fortunately, with "Transporter 3" we're back to basics.
Martin, who would much rather concentrate on delivering packages -- or drive bank robbers from their heists -- is compelled to transport Valentina (Natalya Rudakova), the kidnapped daughter of Leonid Vasilev (Jeroen Krabbe), the head of the Ukraine's Environmental Protection Agency. The route is from Marseilles through Stuttgart and Budapest, ending up in Odessa on the Black Sea. Refreshingly, actual locations are used.
All of this has something to do with Vasiley being blackmailed because he resists the dumping of toxic waste in the Ukraine. With a little bit of help from his friendly rival, the genial and calm French police inspector Tarconi (Francois Berleand), Martin will be forced to deal with the corrupt people who strong-armed him to take the job, some secret agents sent by Vasilev to intercept him and the absolute non-cooperation of his passenger.
During these escapades, which should thrill action-movie fans, Martin retains his principles, showcases his muscular Audi A8 automobile and dispatches villainous types along the way with some remarkable martial arts that the hard-body Statham performs himself.
He's not a pumped-up action guy playing a character who uses bullets instead of brains. Instead, he's a lean, determined and very calculating fellow.
Neither the actor nor the director, Olivier Megaton, rely on Computer Generated Images to carry out stunts. It's like watching a real movie again. And good news for fans of martial arts, master Corey Yuen choreographed the film's fight scenes. The spare and intense screenplay is by Luc Beeson and Robert Mark Kamen, who created the Transporter and Tarconi characters.
"Transporter 3" offers everything I want from the series. What's especially fulfilling is that Martin, who is one of the most consistent on-screen characters you'll ever see, retains his cynical disposition, as well as his resistance to getting involved with an outsider if his mission unexpectedly goes even slightly awry.
I know that this kind of movie is not everyone's cup of tea, but give it a chance. If you haven't seen it, watch the original "The Transporter" at home, then go see this very sleek winner.
The people behind "Australia" want their picture to be considered an epic, but it's actually more a collision of concepts and other movies, especially "The African Queen" and "Gone With the Wind," but not as good as either.
For most of two-and-a-half hours, we watch two people giggle and flirt and play coy sex games. Clearly, the intended scope of the film was big ideas and bigger vistas.
We get the vistas, thanks to Mandy Walker's Oscar-worthy cinematography, but director Baz Luhrmann -- who wrote the original story and contributed to the screenplay with Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanigan -- seems to have forgotten the ideas.
Aussie natives Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, along with what seems like every Australian performer you've ever seen in a movie, star as two people pulled together by circumstances. Both give their all, but the goings on underwhelm them. And the rarely believable Kidman can't hold a candle to Katharine Hepburn or Vivien Leigh. As for Jackman, who's a likable and talented actor, he's a bit too happy-go-lucky to be a threat to Humphrey Bogart or Clark Gable.
The hit-and-miss film is set in bleak, but starkly beautiful northern Australia just prior to World War II. Kidman is a British aristocrat who inherits a cattle ranch the size of West Virginia. When some British cattle barons plot to take her land (and you thought this was about Australia the country), she reluctantly unites with a rough-hewn, Outback-loving man (the often-shirtless Jackman) to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's most desolate land.
Will they fall in love? Will their bickering drive you crazy? Will you go crazy as the movie veers between comedy and drama? And what about the mistreatment of Australia's native aboriginal people? Where's the honesty? I'm tired of the whole "see the happy peasants" concept in films.
Luhrmann includes the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese, but the sequence seems to be in the movie just to have some explosions, not to mention provide some action that threatens the couple. Is it actually Luhrmann's homage to the burning of Atlanta in "Gone With the Wind?"
Also, there's something seriously wrong with a movie when the best acting comes from an amateur. Brandon Walters is a 12-year-old who is of Aboriginal descent . He plays Nullah, an Aborigine whose storyline is more compelling than anything with which Kidman and Jackman are saddled.
"Australia" lacks genuine power.
Do Hollywood types think sitting in a movie theater watching annoying and obnoxious people isn't annoying and obnoxious? News-flash: It is.
The not particularly funny "Four Christmases" is loaded with jerks. Mismatched and actually quite uninteresting Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughan are a twosome who hate spending Christmas with their extended family -- lots of divorces with lots of nutty in-laws.
Of course, for the purposes of the plot, they have to spend four separate Christmas with these very same idiots.
If you've seen the preview, you've seen the movie. The puking baby and the big galoots wrestling is mildly funny just once.
The heavyweight co-starring cast includes Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Colleen Camp, Dwight Yoakam, Jon Favreau, Kristin Chenoweth, Tim McGraw and Mary Steenburgen -- all of whom are swamped by the unfocused and sloppy direction by Seth Gordon and by the unfunny screenplay by Matt Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore.
How dumb is all of this? People connected with the movie are quoted as saying it was hilarious just seeing the tiny Witherspoon standing next to the huge Vaughn. If that's all you've got, folks, you've got nothing.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 2 2008 |