Classic Review: The Transporter: Refueled (2015)

Since I’ve started this site, I’ve written a lot of reviews. In case you missed some of my earlier ones, I would like to share an older review of “The Transporter: Refueled” which originally appeared here.

Frank Martin (Ed Skrein) tries to live a safe life transporting mysterious packages for numerous questionable people. Things soon change when a woman named Anna (Loan Chabanol) and her three friends Gina, Maria. and Qiao (Gabriella Wright, Tatiana Pajkovic, and Wenxia Yu) take part in a bank heist and blackmail Frank by kidnapping his Father, Frank Senior (Ray Stevenson), to assure his compliance. All of this is part of their master plan to take down the human trafficker who victimized them in the past. Now with no choice, Frank must put his past skills to the test in order to be a part of the girls’ dangerous plan and save his father.

I’m not sure if this film was even necessary after the three previous films (I’ve only seen the first one) with Jason Statham as Frank Martin. I thought it did a decent job back then with the action sequences either with the car chases and the fight scenes, etc and it wasn’t too flashy while doing it. I thought this new film, where the people involved with the previous series are involved with this one, held up to the standard set by the previous series. Skrein was able to portray the strong, silent type of guy I remembered Frank Martin was. He was very likeable and really looked like an action star. I also thought he had good chemistry with Ray Stevenson as his father. They played off of each other well and their many exchanges and one-liners were rather entertaining. This was my favorite part of the film but I just wish we could have had more of that. I will explain why a little later. The action scenes in this one were well done as the car-related scenes were well shot and captivating despite sometimes feeling like an Audi commercial and certain implausible things were happening on screen and the fight scenes were well choreographed and very creative at times which I appreciated. The only thing I didn’t like about the film was the story. Without giving anything away, there are two things I didn’t like about the story. The first being the girls’ story. Supposedly they are victims of human trafficking but other than in one scene, we see no evidence of what was done to them. We only have their own words to go on for this. With no real idea of where they were coming from, I couldn’t connect with what they were trying to do so I did not care so much about them. I thought the story focused a little too much on them which took away from the part about the relationship between Frank and his father which I enjoyed the most. The second thing is the villain. Other than the one scene I mentioned previously, we never really get a sense of how evil he really is. This also took away from the story so I did not care as much about him either. Despite all of that this a decent action film that will keep you entertained for all of its 90 minute running time.

Score: 7.5/10

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.