It being Bond-lite, young Frank gets the girl in the end, shortly after she has once again threatened him with a gun waved in his face. Weird that.
What is in essence a wannabe James Bond exercise works itself out with some odd twists involving furiously-executed money transfers – online banking, hello – with a strange reliance on quotations from Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers along with Ray Stevenson’s weird obsession with the Basque country. Thus Frank junior sets that striking jaw of his against the old enemy, who are of course Russian. To carry out their plan, the girls do the old lookalike decoy trick with blonde wigs, while dressed in identical black dresses. The good news is there is money in the revenge mission, though pops and his young fella are the reluctant heroes of the piece, forced at gunpoint into assisting the girls. Anyway, father and son become lured into an elaborate revenge drama cooked up by a quartet of fearless young women trafficked into prostitution some 15 years previously. However, it’s a kind of double wool-pulling, as the son doesn’t tell the father either about some of the murky stuff he has been involved in as a special-ops mercenary. The truth is he has been involved in murky arms deals in places like Medellín and Fallujah. Now he is retiring - or at least he thinks he is - with a paltry 790 Euros a month to live on, clearly too little to sustain his taste for the odd 900 euro bottle of wine. Then Frank heads off to meet his dad, Frank senior, who believes he has fooled his son into thinking that he spent most of his adult career selling Evian water.
Not on your nelly - The Transporter Refueled has got a 15a cert so it will be swift on its route into the story, introducing us to Frank Martin (Ed Skrein) and his funky-looking car, as he does impressive things with the key fob before rendering a gang of thieves unconscious with some swift Jujitsu-type moves. Hold off on whatever you are about to give us and focus a while on sapphire sea, blinding sand, gently-waving palm trees, daiquiris in frozen glasses. Now don’t we all just perk up and sit up straight when we see a movie which announces its location as “the French Riviera?” Let the camera pan happily up and down the coast for a few minutes. Ah, overhead shots of sea, sand and loungers.
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