To say The Transporter is a bad movie is largely beside the point. I could write a review about how the movie is a plotless meandering action farce, that some of the lines are so clich?d the movie comes off as a parody of itself, that director Cory Yuen ripped off the central plot device from Lethal Weapon 4, for which he was the martial arts choreographer, as well as a ten minute scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I could mention all these things and leave it at that.
But I won?t. Instead, I choose to examine not why the movie is so bad, but rather, why I want to say the movie is so bad. Or, to paraphrase Foucault, the question is not ?why does The Transporter suck?? but rather, ?why do I have the temptation to so loudly and vehemently proclaim that The Transporter sucks??
I think the reason is because The Transporter plays upon cultural insecurities and biases, particularly male insecurities around homosexuality and bondage fetishism. I contend that I dislike this movie not because it is merely badly written, but because that bad writing employs loathsome ideas such as ?Asian women like being mistreated? and ?homosexuals must be punished.?
At this point you?re probably thinking I?m full of intellectual bullshit and have decided to overanalyze a rather poor piece of media to extract some entertainment value from an experience that was otherwise a waste of time. This is true. Don?t let that detract from the fun in doing so, though. Read on.
The first half hour of the movie fixates on two things: an Asian female in bondage and how much the male hero Frank (Jason Statham) loves his car. Frank is the eponymous ?transporter,? and his frequently unsavory cargo includes one bound and gagged woman named Lai (Qi Shu, who does surprisingly well in her Hollywood debut).
One of the first interactions between these two characters is when Frank cuts a tiny hole in the gag Lai is wearing to insert a straw so that she can suck some juice from a bottle. The scene is oral sex by proxy, a comparison only heightened by their relative positions, she in the trunk, he holding the bottle?s straw at waist level in front of his crotch. He is in the dominant position, she in the submissive, kicking off a relationship that will only get more exploitive.
Frank does cut her free from her bonds to pee, only to tether her around the neck with a rope. After she predictably escapes, Frank recaptures her, ties her up again and nonchalantly tosses her back in the trunk.
Indeed, Frank is seems unbothered by anything except mistreatment of his car. The only time he actively gets pissed is when his car is destroyed by a car bomb. To retaliate, Frank steals a car from the perpetrator, and finds, inexplicably, Lai bound and gagged again in the back seat, making three separate incidents where Frank either binds Lai or leaves Lai bound while in his company.
Frank does cut her free eventually when he gets home, only to order her to shut up, and then he promptly goes to bed.
And what does Lai do in response to this treatment? Is she outraged? Does she go to the police? Does she escape?
No. By the film?s logic, because Lai happened to be in Frank?s trunk, and has been ?such a burden? to Frank, she is in debt to him. So she makes him breakfast. Perkily. She makes him coffee, some sort of French pastry, and eventually screws him ? in her own words, all to make up for being such a burden. The movie seems to enjoy portraying the myth that Asian girls don?t get upset over being tied up, that they like it, it kind of turns them on, and that they will have sex with you if you order them around like a militant puppy (for other examples of this myth, go here, here, here, or here, or type ?Asian bondage? into Google and see what comes up [Biggerboat not liable for any offense to your moral sensibilities as the result of such a search. - Ed.]).
This isn?t the first time Luc Besson, the producer of The Transporter, has used an edgy sexual subtext. His crime classic The Professional explored a relationship between an older man and a pre-pubescent girl, rife with sexual overtones. At one point Nathalie Portman explicitly points to this subtext when she convinces a concierge that she and the hit man are lovers. In The Professional, barked orders and frosty behavior also yield complete obedience with strange sexual overtones that are allegedly fleshed out even more in the French version of the film.
Anyway, back to The Transporter. While Lai is busy making up for being a burden, the main bad guy, known only as ?Wall Street? (why? obscure WTO reference?) and played casually by Matt Shulze, adds unmistakable homoerotic overtones to his interactions with Frank and other male characters. Observe his lingering touch when he pays Frank for successful transport of Lai, and the way he weirdly caresses a henchman with a hankie before he kills him.
The subtext is a stereotypical fear of homosexuals as the enemy. Similar themes have been explored better in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Pulp Fiction, and worse in Broken Arrow. The implicit fear is that the big bad gay guy will not only rape the protagonist, but that the protagonist may actually like it.
Why does Wall Street ask his minions to take Frank alive? Oh, no good reason, you say, bad writing. Just so that there can be an action sequence without guns.
Okay, then why in that action sequence does Frank again take off his shirt bringing the third time Statham?s chest has a cameo role? Oh, just to show off his rippling pecs.
Why does he get all lathered up in oil and rub around on the ground with about ten other men? Oh, that?s, er, just a novel fighting sequence.
Why does that fighting sequence end with Frank kissing another man underwater? No, see, Frank had to kiss-I mean, suck air out of another guys lungs because he was trapped underwater, see, by burning oil on the surface, and he needed more air, to, you know, swim out.
The movie?s thin semblance of a plot is merely the explicit manifestation of Frank?s own Asian fetish and sexual insecurity. Frank is a repressed homosexual who, confronted with his own attraction to slippery oiled up males, must strike out against them, and hurt the fixation of his attraction, which he sees as the source of his unacceptable lust. Frank overcomes his own sexual demons as much as the evil workings of Wall Street and Mr. Kwai (played by Ric Young, who for all intents and purposes plays the same role as he did in the appropriately overlooked movie Chain of Command). The sexual subtext is heightened by a sound track that sounds like a porn shoot.
Like most pieces of bad media, it was hard to enjoy The Transporter ?straight?. But with a little over-the-top textual analysis, the movie is rife with discussion topics.
Posted by John on October 1, 2002
Tags: Reviews
Comments on specific paragraphs:
Click the
icon to the right of a paragraph
Comments on the page as a whole:
Click the
icon to the right of the page title (works the same as paragraphs)