I quite enjoyed the first two Transporter films, and despite hearing bad things about it was looking forward to this film. But I was disappointed. The film does look great still with crisp editing and striking location shooting. The soundtrack is also still energetic, while too serious at times the action is gripping and well-choreographed enough and Jason Statham is very charismatic. However, the dialogue is mostly terrible, cheesy and forced and slows the film down furthermore. The pace lacks the breakneck style of the first two films, and the film with its poorly explored characters, generic plot and lazy acting and directing is in all honesty quite dull. All in all, a real step-down and should have been much better. 4/10 Bethany Cox

After the guilty pleasure of TRANSPORTER 2 comes the third and weakest part of the trilogy, a series that has by now completely outstayed its welcome. Filled with the kind of nonsensical plotting that appears to have been written on the back of a beermat, TRANSPORTER 3 is an utterly pointless exercise in style that fails in pretty much every level. Once again, gruff hard man Jason Statham is given a job involving a fiery redhead – an extremely irritating drug-abusing teenager who occupies way too much screen time. Lots of car chases and martial arts bouts ensue, but even Corey Yuen's choreography can't help this mess of a movie.

As usual, the action sequences are preposterous, often disregarding the laws of coincidence and gravity in favour of a visual, visceral slickness. They're shallow re-runs of the same situations in the earlier films, and by now watching Statham beating up a group of bad guys without ever getting a scratch is a real bore. Give me a gritty, realistic fight in which we feel the protagonist is genuinely fighting for his life any day. The plot is ludicrous – why can't the bad guys just drive the girl? – and wastes Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbe (star of Verhoeven's THE FOURTH MAN) in a boring sub-plot involving a business deal. As for quiff-wearing bad guy Robert Knepper (SPECIES 3),the less said the better! Director Olivier Megaton bypasses suspense, charisma or narrative drive in favour of lots of shots of shiny chrome and scenes featuring Statham without his shirt on. Speaking of which, look out for the bit in which the girl forces Statham to strip for her – can you imagine the sleaziness of a gender-swap version of this scene? Just one example of the outrageous, aimed-at-twelve-year-olds kind of nonsense in evidence here.

Frank Martin (Jason Statham) rejects work from mysterious bad guy (Robert Knepper) and refers another driver for the job. When that driver comes crashing through his home, Frank is forced to do the job by the bad guy. Frank has a kidnapped girl (Natalya Rudakova) in the car, and they're both trapped by bracelets that will be explode if they stray 75 feet away from the car.

This is what it is. There's no way of escaping the ridiculous concept, and silly storyline. It's an excuse for Jason Statham to do some super fighting, and some super driving. Natalya Rudakova is not the most charismatic actress. There's nothing wrong with that, but it has to be understood that this movie is not trying to be anything more than that. So enjoy the super fighting, and the car chase action.