Jason Statham is once again back in the driver's seat for the third installment of the car chase/martial arts extravaganza that is the Transporter series. This one, cleverly titled Transporter 3, takes the retired driver and forces him at gunpoint to take another gig. Now I'm a huge fan of the first film, what with its incredible chase sequences and inventive martial arts fights. It really was something fun and special that never took itself too seriously, but never used that as an excuse for shoddy filmmaking. The second film, on the other hand, was everything people thought the first would be: silly, over the top and ridiculous beyond believability. By the time Statham gets around to disarming a bomb on the bottom of his car by jumping it into a spin so he could knock it off with a dangling crane hook, you certainly don't care about how silly a kung fu fight on a crashing plane (which continues after the crash) is.

So the third film seems to straddle the line between the first two -- not nearly as good or inventive as the first, but nowhere near as ludicrous as the second. Transporter 3 is a solid actioner that delivers all the goods with a fun and frenetic but all too forgettable pace. This is just a good old-fashioned fluffy, fire-and-forget film that is plenty entertaining and can easily be watched again, mostly because you won't remember much of it after the first viewing.

Statham's Frank the Driver is once again accepting jobs, but when one comes across as fishy he instead passes it on to another driver. When that gig goes terribly wrong, Frank ends up in a car with a bomb strapped to his wrist, an unconscious girl in his driver seat, and a warning that if he gets too far from the car, he'll blow up. If he strays from his course, he'll blow up. And Frank ... well Frank doesn't like blowing up. So he gets in a lot of car chases and fist fights instead. While wearing a bomb.

Good stuff.

But don't let the "2 Disc Fully Loaded Edition" fool you, as that term is used rather loosely here. The second disc is the now commonplace digital copy (which I love by the way, no downloading is a good thing). Most of the special features on disc one aren't really all that special. In fact, they're a little light on real content.

Most of the features are standard, by-the-book making-of promo featurettes ranging from 3 to 10 minutes. However, there is one stand-out special feature: a 15-minute talking-heads documentary, "Special Delivery: Transporters in the Real World." Here ex-military/ex-intelligence guys talk about what it's like to really work as a transporter in this day and age. They openly discuss how silly the Transporter series is and how far off from reality it strays while detailing the dangers and the methods of the job we've come to enjoy watching. It's an interesting, enlightening session full of red-meat information that is unafraid to deconstruct the entertainment it's helping to push.

All told, Transporter 3 is a fun, mindless series of action scenes that will give you an evening's worth of entertainment but won't stick to your ribs.

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