We’re not going to lie to your face and hold The Transporter trilogy up as some sort of bastion of cinematic excellence, but they were perfectly acceptable for what they were.
The first installment was Jason Statham’s first major leading role in the action genre, and it set him up nicely for the following 20 years that firmly established his credentials as one of the most popular and reliable grizzled badasses in the business.
However, once you remove the chrome-domed former competitive diver from the equation, then The Transporter brand in effect becomes redundant. However, that didn’t stop EuropaCorp from trying to squeeze every last penny of residual name value from the property, which unfortunately culminated in The Transporter Refueled.
Ed Skrein does his best with the hand he’s been dealt, and he acquits himself reasonably well when it comes to the combat, but the entire thing is just so painfully dull and unnecessary that The Transporter Refueled spectacularly fails to justify its own existence.
It did make $72 million at the box office on a $22 million budget, though, even if a 16% Rotten Tomatoes score and 30% audience rating is hardly the stuff dreams are made of. That being said, The Transporter Refueled has been experiencing an inexplicable resurgence on Netflix having cracked the Top 10 most-watched list, as per FlixPatrol.
