The Transporter Refueled is a 2015 action film directed by Camille Delamarre, written by Luc Besson, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, and produced by EuropaCorp. It runs 96 minutes, cost twenty-two million dollars and took around seventy-two million worldwide. Ed Skrein plays Frank Martin, the professional driver previously and definitively played by Jason Statham, with Ray Stevenson as Frank Martin Senior and Loan Chabanol as Anna, who draws Frank into a bank heist alongside three other women seeking revenge on the man who trafficked them. To ensure his cooperation, they poison his father.

A few weeks ago, reviewing Statham's Mutiny, I remarked that it would be a genuinely sad day when we stop getting new Jason Statham films. This film is a preview of that day, and I would like to register a complaint with whoever is scheduling it.

My first objection is the name, and it turns out to be a more substantial objection than I initially realised. They could have called this anything. And more importantly, they should have, because this is not a continuation of anything. Statham was offered a three-film deal by EuropaCorp to keep the franchise going. When those negotiations collapsed, the studio simply rebooted, hired a new lead, and retained the branding. There is not a single reference to the events of the previous three films anywhere in it. It is a fresh start wearing somebody else's jacket. Its original title was The Transporter Legacy, which one critic noted at the time was an awkward choice, given that the actual legacy belonged to the three films they had declined to continue.

And that original trilogy looks like a run of Academy Award winners in comparison. The first film in particular was genuinely excellent at what it set out to do. Statham was quiet, dryly funny, and visibly capable in a fight, which mattered enormously. I believed he was that character, and based on the career he has constructed since, I suspect he believed it too. Worth noting for anyone following along with this channel that the original was co-directed by Louis Leterrier, whose recent film The Last House I covered a few weeks ago.

Ed Skrein is the central problem, though I am not convinced it is entirely his fault. Critics at the time were consistent about it, describing him as serviceable but painfully generic, a slick facsimile of something that had once been fresh. He has the physicality and the reflexes, and the hand-to-hand work is competently shot, but the effortless stoic wit is simply absent, and without it the character does not exist.