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  • Anti-Climax Boss: Lola in the second film. You'd expect her to give a better fight but Frank dispatches her quite easily.
  • Broken Base: The lack of Jason Statham in the fourth movie. Is Ed Skrein a decent replacement as a younger Frank Martin, or is The Transporter without Jason Statham like The Fast and the Furious without Vin Diesel?
  • Cargo Ship: In 2 after Frank demolishes a garage-full of mooks, the Jamaican cab driver Frank used to get there is seen speaking soothingly to the yellow Porsche he's hiding in. At the end of the movie we see he's nicked the car and turned it into a Porsche cab, to the envy of his fellow cabbies.
  • Complete Monster:
    • First film: Darren "Wall Street" Bettencourt is a smug dandy and wealthy businessman who doubles as a human trafficker. Working to deliver a load of 400 Chinese charges into the French Mediterranean to sell the lot of them as slaves, Wall Street attempts to have the titular transporter, Frank Martin, killed after he clues into his scheme and finds the daughter of his associate Mr. Kwai. Murdering one of his own men in the hospital to keep him from talking and having Frank's own house blown up to kill him, Wall Street uses his own position to frame Frank when he's finally cornered, and smugly informs him five of the charges died on the way to France before knocking Frank out.
    • Second film:
      • Gianni Chellini is an unscrupulous Columbian crime lord who hires his ruthlessness out to the highest bidder. Contracted by The Cartel to halt the drug fighting policies of Jefferson Billings and other politicians, Chellini unleashes the murderous Lola to kidnap Jefferson's son Jack and slaughter anyone in her way. Chellini then threatens the young Jack with a dismemberment before infecting the boy with a lethal virus and returning him to his parents "unharmed". Chellini intends for Jack to spread the virus to his parents and everyone attending the upcoming drug control conference, willing to let potentially hundreds of innocents die from his plan so long as he gets paid.
      • Lola is Chellini's lover and hitwoman, a bloodthirsty vampire of a woman who admits she does everything she does for the fetishistic pleasure of killing people. Lola murders an innocent receptionist and a doctor so she can dress up as them to trick Frank, guns down one of her minions without a smidge of remorse, and murders cops one after another even when Frank is trying to prevent her from doing so. When she delivers young Jack to Chillini's clutches, she teases him over how evil his plot his, gleefully anticipating the moment that the plague she's helped unleash kills dozens of people.
    • Refueled: Arkady Karasov is the leader of the Russian sex trafficking ring Le Coeur Brisé ("the Broken Heart)". Introduced mowing down a street corner of pimps and thugs to take over their territory for himself, Karasov then begins implementing his own prostitution ring throughout the world, forcing women to do his bidding under threat of violence and death. Karasov deals in girls as young as twelve, and is also known to take girls for himself as his personal sex slaves. After his partners turn on him due to one of his former prostitutes, Anna, ruining his reputation, Karasov guns down several of his associates and attempts to kidnap Anna and brutally punish her for all the trouble she caused him.
  • Director Displacement: Luc Besson co-wrote and co-produced the series, but didn't direct any of them.
  • Ham and Cheese: Kate Nauta in Transporter 2. It's pretty clear from her line delivery and facial expressions that once she read the script (which calls for her character, Lola, to spend half her screentime wearing a soaking-wet negligee, disheveled hair and runny eye makeup while dual-wielding pistols and gunning down all manner of individuals), she decided to take it as far as she could, and she looks to be the only person not to deliver the cornball material in a serious manner.
  • Ho Yay: Some fans find homosexual imagery in the films:
    • Frank sucks the last breath out of a dead man's lungs to stay underwater and evade the villains' gunfire.
    • Frank covers himself in motor oil to fight a gang of Mooks, and one of them almost slides head-first into his crotch.
    • Every movie has a male villain who physically touches Frank when talking with him.
    • (From the series): Frank and Jim in episode 2.
  • Moment of Awesome:
    • All of the fights form the first movie, the bus station one in particular. In the second movie, he kills eleven Mooks with a firehose! Dry firehose, by the way.
    • How about how Frank turns the tables on the Big Bad in part 3 with the exploding bracelet?
  • Moral Event Horizon: Wall Street in the first film definitely crosses it when he stuffs a cloth into the mouth of one of his henchmen, who was hospitalised due to being injured during the confrontation with Frank, causing him to suffocate to death after discovering that Frank didn't get killed in the explosion from his car.
  • Replacement Scrappy: A Downplayed Trope example. Ed Skrein is not Frank Martin as far as the fanbase is concerned but no one really has anything bad to say about his performance. It's more a case of a Tough Act to Follow and Overshadowed by Awesome.
  • Romantic Plot Tumor: Frank and Audrey in part 2.
  • The Scrappy: Valentina from the third movie. She's easy on the eyes, surrounded by a black and gray cast, in a franchise with over-the-top villains and character flaws, and is supposed to be sympathetic. Standing out as obnoxious under those circumstances is something of an accomplishment.
  • Sequelitis: While some people will argue that the second film is just as good as (if not better than) the first one, few people would say the third is up to par with the previous two, though it does have its moments. The fourth movie was hit hard by this trope, with both critics and fans panning it for lacking either the charm of the earlier entries or Jason Statham.
  • So Bad, It's Good: Some viewers enjoyment of the films was greatly increased by viewing them this way. Especially the second one.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Audrey in 2. She's clearly not happy that she married a politician, lusts after their chauffer (even making a move on him when she gets drunk at a party), berates her husband for his job making it difficult to be part of his son's life, and even blames him for the boy being kidnapped due to his job making him and his family targets for evil people.


The TV Series

  • Complete Monster:
    • "Beacon of Hope": Basem Al-Harazi is a ruthless African warlord who cuts into the relief efforts of aid worker Zac Preston, buying off supplies he intends to use a for orphaned children he's taking care of. When Zac starts to defy him, Al-Harazi furiously tries to pinpoint his location, prying Zac's location out of a local man by shooting his friend dead and later murdering the man himself. Out of spite for Zac's defiance of him, Al-Harazi intends to murder Zac and every single one of the children he's taking care of, brutally torturing Frank Martin when he learns he's allied with Zac and even threatening to personally blow out the brains of one of the children to make him talk.
    • Anatole Reichenberg, from Euphro, is a seemingly-benevolent, charitable pharmaceutical head who in reality is a greedy sociopath who sells deliberately faulty medicine to hospitals to rake in the cash, regardless of the many sick children who start dying from his fake medicine. Anatole enforces police brutality and keeps the head of the police in his pocket by quietly threatening the man's pregnant wife, and later plans to send out a massive shipment of his fake medicine, causing untold death, all for the purpose of lining his pockets. When Frank Martin tries to stop him, Anatole takes two of his friends hostage and smugly dares Martin into shooting him, fully believing himself to be above any consequence for his monstrous actions.
    • Gary Landsman, from "Sex, Lies and Videotape", is a hedonistic film director who sets up his own prostitution ring in Prague to make more money. Buying or otherwise kidnapping women, even teenage girls, to force them into sexual slavery, Landsman callously murders any who try to escape his clutches. As prostitution is legal in Prague, Landsman uses his prostitutes to seduce politicians and wealthy businessmen, secretly videotapes their encounter, then uses it to blackmail the clients into making sure no new laws prohibiting prostitution are enacted.
    • Louis Tien, from "Chimera", is a drug dealing crime lord who graduates to arms dealing when he discovers the formula for a deadly biovirus. After murdering his lab head when the man refused to assist him, Tien forces the man's son Lim to create the biovirus—dubbed Chimera—for Tien, constantly mocking him about his father's death. Proudly proclaiming that Chimera will be able to wipe out Chicago in mere minutes, Tien plans to sell it to the insane extremist Blake, knowing he will use it to wipe out numerous cities and kill countless innocents, and only laughs at the fact that he'll be rich enough to continue his operations indefinitely.

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