Transporter 3

IN A WEEK of interesting failures and partial triumphs, it's gratifying to welcome a film that succeeds so completely on its own (albeit undemanding) terms.

Fans of the first two Transporterfilms have come to expect a very particular class of vehicular madness — Laws of Motion by Road Runner rather than Isaac Newton - and they will not be disappointed by this brilliantly stupid third episode. Enthusiasts will also (yet again) get some wildly inventive fights, a degree of homoeroticism and enough Eurotrash to fill a dozen landfill sites. What else would you expect from a director named Olivier Megaton?

This time round, Jason Statham's gruff driver finds himself accompanying a kidnapped Ukrainian girl all the way from Marseilles to Odessa. She is the daughter of an environmentally concerned politician (Jeroen Krabbe) who is on the point of bringing in some law that will make life difficult for a sinister corporation.

Agents of that conglomerate - whose hazardous liquid waste bubbles menacingly like something from Dr Frankenstein's lab - have devised an ingenious way of ensuring Jason's compliance: he is forced to wear a bracelet that will explode if he moves more than 25 feet from his apparently indestructible motorcar.

You see what we mean by brilliantly stupid. Everything the hero does he must do in his car. When the girl is dragged onto a train he has to drive onto and then actually intothe hurtling carriage. When the vehicle ends up in a lake he must suck air from the tires while he waits for a miracle. The conceit is not quite as intoxicatingly delightful as that in Statham's recent Crank, but it does force the film-makers to devise some ingenious solutions to some taxing problems.

Transporter 3will, of course, appal as many thinking cineastes as it delights Clarksonian petrol- heads. The picture will particularly excite the manufacturers of a certain German saloon. If the action is to be believed, their vehicle can drive on two wheels, stop dead atop a hurtling train and function after being dunked in a lake. Advancement through Technology, indeed.

Directed by Olivier Megaton. Starring Jason Statham, François Berleand, Natalya Rudakova, Robert Knepper, Jeroen Krabbe 15A cert, gen release, 100 min ***