'Transporter 3" is a perfectly acceptable brainless action thriller, inspiring us to give a lot of thought to complex sequences we would have been better off sucking on as eye candy. Consider this ingenious dilemma faced by the Transporter: He cannot remove a bracelet that is linked to a mighty bomb in his Audi A8. If he goes more than 75 feet from the car, the explosion kills him. He and the car and the Girl are trapped on a bridge by men with machine guns. He releases the Girl. The men are shooting at him. How can he escape?

Because we know it's impossible to kill an action hero with machine-gun fire, no matter how many rounds, he is in no real danger. But as men advance on him from both ends of the bridge, he has to do SOMETHING to keep up appearances. But what does the Transporter do? Steers hard to the left, drives through the bridge rail and plunges into the lake. Now we're talking real trouble. If he swims for the shore, the bomb will kill him. The only answer is to take the car to the shore with him, while holding his breath.

Anyway, the plot involves bad guys who want to bring eight container ships of toxic poisons into a Ukrainian harbor. But the Ukrainian minister (Jeroen Krabbe) doesn't want to give his permission. Meanwhile, the bad guys kidnap the Girl (Natalya Rudakova), and the Transporter's job is to transport her for the bad guys, although he begins to care for her.

Jason Statham is a splendid action hero, a tight-lipped know-it-all with the official three-day stubble. The bad guys are suitably reprehensible, and when you see the Transporter thinking his way out of that problem on the bottom of the lake, you're amazed that later he restarts the engine and uses it to drive onto the top of a speeding train, and then ingeniously calculates a way to use the train's speed to save ..... but see for yourself. That A8, what a car.

- By Roger Ebert / Universal Press Syndicate

Transporter 3

Rating: 2 and a half stars (out of four)

Cast: Jason Statham, Robert Knepper, Francois Berleand.

Running time: 105 minutes.

Rated: PG-13; sequences of intense action and violence, some sexual content and drug material.