TRANSPORTER 3

(Olivier Megaton, 2008)

Megaton has probably the coolest name for any action director ever. It seems as if he was fated to be an action director. What a shame then that his direction of action scenes is so utterly inept. Cut to pieces, pointless zooms and pans tied to those cuts (for impact!), witless camera angles which detract from the performers physicality rather than enhancing it...he does more or less everything wrong.
His film then is a waste of Jason Statham, a martial artist whose combination of brute force and grace is unique in modern action cinema (he is half football hooligan, half black belt).
Staham plays "transporter" Frank for the third time, breaking all of his self-imposed rules yet again as he transports a Ukrainian girl across Europe for some gangsters.
Along the way there are the usual car chases, a fistfight in a garage, Statham (or in this case a stuntman with Megaton making little obvious effort to disguise that fact) on a bicycle, and lots of tough guy posturing. It is totally forgettable, laking even a single memorable set-piece.
Next to Megaton, other Luc Besson proteges like Louise Letterier and Pierre Morel look like Walter Hill.

SPY

(Paul Feig, 2015)

In which Feig nimbly manages to combine his dirty-chuckle-of-a-sensibility with a James Bond parody, create a series of surprisingly decent action scenes, and show a whole new side to Jason Statham. Not bad going.
Melissa McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, a desk-bound CIA agent, content to live out her life as the voice in the ear of super-smooth super agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law), with whom she is in unrequited love. Until that is Fine is killed on a mission by Raina (Rose Byrne in comedy foreign bitch mode). Then Susan finds herself in the field, trying to find Raina and a stolen nuke, while also having to deal with the macho semi-competence of rogue agent Rick Ford (Statham chewing scenery manically as he parodies himself and every action cliche ever). At that point the film goes all globe-trotting, with scenes in Paris, Rome and Budapest, gunfights, fistfights and car chases.
But the best material is almost all in the interplay between McCarthy and the rest of the cast, especially when she is allowed off her leash in the third act.
Much of the funniest bits are courtesy of the supporting cast, with Brits Peter Serafinowicz and Miranda Hart especially impressive.

HOMEFRONT

(Gary Fleder, 2013)

Very much like an action thriller from another era - theres a lot of the 1980s here, and possibly even more of the 1970s - Homefront is never quite brave enough to go all-out to satisfy the sort of pulp cravings those movies effortlessly catered to.
Despite the presence of Jason Statham in the lead as retired undercover cop Phil Broker, director Fleder makes it all a little too slick and a little too mainstream to work. The screenplay - by Sylvester Stallone, a reliably canny creator in terms of base action thrills - is brutal and simplistic and classical in construction. Broker and his 9 year old daughter are living in a small Louisiana town after his (pre-credits) involvement in a massive operation to bring down a Biker gang ended in much bloodshed. A schoolyard altercation between his daughter and a bully escalates until the local drug kingpin, Gator Bodine (James Franco, surprisingly bland) becomes involved, discovers who Broker is, and calls in the Biker gang for help in disposing of this quiet man with devastating combat acumen.
The smalltown Louisiana setting works well, and the cast is unexpectedly starry for this sort of material, with the likes of Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder both good in small parts as desperate women of different stripes, and Frank Grillo reliably nasty as a Biker assassin.
Fleder can do action competently, too, and Statham has a few impressive fight scenes. But competence is about as good as it gets. Its never delirious enough or offensively violent enough or bleak enough or funny enough. It sets up its familiar story, you know exactly what will happen, then that happens.
Which is perhaps what many Statham fans want of a Statham film. But he's capable of more. Films like this - with a sprinkling of cinematic pedigree - are small steps towards something more.
And its frustrating when they don't get there.

HUMMINGBIRD

aka REDEMPTION

(Steven Knight, 2013)

Hummingbird is about as close as Jason Statham gets these days to working in non-genre cinema. That is to say it's still a genre film, it just has fewer action sequences than the majority of his films do. In their place there is much more dramatic content which requires a lot more from him as an actor, and he delivers fairly well, giving a sensitive, sustained and committed reading of a particular shade to his usual grim and ultra-violent hero.
He plays Joey, an ex Special forces soldier who has escaped from a Military Asylum after an incident in Afghanistan and is living rough in the streets of Central London. A violent encounter leads him to take shelter in the vacant Covent Garden apartment of a photographer, and while recovering there, Joey begins to put his life back together. He finds work as an enforcer for the Chinese mob, using his earnings to help the mission for the homeless run by Sister Cristina (Agata Buzek), while searching for the killer of his friend Isabel. Of course, he and Cristina develop feelings for one another, and Joey's past is never very far away.
While it initially seems like it might be a boiler plate Statham revenge actioner, Hummingbird eventually emerges as a love story between two damaged people. Joey and Cristina's story is told against the complicated tapestry writer-director Knight paints of modern London, here luminously shot by old master Chris Menges as a neon-slicked nocturnal city. This tale takes in protection rackets, prostitution, the restaurant trade, the art world and the police, and Statham broods his way through all of it, only occasionally allowed to explode into violence. He and Buzek have some chemistry, and their relationship is oddly touching despite the awkward set-up of some entirely cliched material.
But Statham's very presence seems to tug the film in another direction; for all it's evenly paced seriousness and the many talky scenes about emotions and plot, it almost feels as if it wants to be an action film, and Knight correspondingly stages the few brutal fight scenes with vivid panache.
Still, it's an interesting change of pace for the star, and it reveals a few more emotional registers within his range, even while it is much more entertaining when he is hurting people.

PARKER

(Taylor Hackford, 2013)

The best parts of Parker are the procedural sequences. The opening scene, for example, depicts a well-planned heist by a gang of five men. They steal the cash from the safes at a State Fair on a busy summer day through a combination of brute force, distraction and precision timing. In the aftermath, four of the men doublecross another and leave him for dead at the side of the road.
He is Parker, he is played by Jason Statham, and he is, of course, not dead when they drive away. The rest of the film depicts his execution of a plan to take revenge upon his erstwhile partners.
He follows them to Palm Beach in Florida, teams up with a desperate and cash-strapped Estate Agent (Jennifer Lopez) to discover what the job they're planning there is, and makes moves to interfere. Meanwhile, the Chicago Mob, discomfited by some of Parker's activities, have sent men after him and his loved ones.
Parker is an adaptation of the 19th Parker novel by Richard Stark, and the first adaptation of one of the post-Comeback novels (there was a 13 year gap between novels 16 and 17 in the sequence). Statham isn't quite right for the role, but he's close enough. Parker is a career criminal, relentlessly professional in his approach to his livelihood, and capable of staggeringly brutal violence, and Statham has played characters very much like this in the past. He might be too short and too British for the role, but his screen persona is so strong and well-defined, that it stops mattering a few minutes into the film. He carries the sense of danger that Parker (in the novels) exudes around with him, and has a focus, intensity and confidence that suits the character well.
However, another joy of the Parker books is the world Stark creates, filled as it is with a series of shady thieves, killers and deceitful femme fatales, all of them moving through a delirious pulp underworld ruled over by "the Outfit", a version of the Mob who Parker frequently crosses in his efforts to remain independent. Parker fudges this - the universe of some of Tarantino's crime films is closer - replacing it with a more blandly glossy realist version of the daylit noir world seen in so many modern crime films.
And yet; the film is efficient and entertaining in its telling of this familiar tale, as Statham bludgeons his way through obstacles, steals cars and makes plans. The villains are nicely cast - a sweaty Michael Chiklis presiding over a gang including Wendell Pierce and Clifton Collins Jr. - the action scenes direct and nasty, particularly a deadly Bourne-style fight with an assassin in a hotel room, and it all looks handsome in an anonymous, vaguely stately manner.
Hackford may be so comfortable with the procedural elements because he has himself always been a vaguely anonymous professional; always competent but rarely acclaimed, just like the smooth, disciplined Parker. He draws good work from Lopez here; she is the human heart of the film, funny and touching as a woman nearing middle age whose life hasn't worked out how she planned.

EXPENDABLES 2

(Simon West, 2012) For something so terribly cynical, theres something heartfelt and almost naive about The Expendables films. The plot points and cliches of characterisation they use are so lame and old-fashioned that - in the age of Michael Bay and "chaos cinema" - they feel strangely authentic in their attempt to reconnect with the spirit of the action movie as it was imagined in the 1980s. This film is sleeker, slicker and far less baggy than the original, stuffing in more action scenes, more old school action stars (adding Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme and new DTV hero Scott Adkins to the original roster) but containing them within a mostly-coherent plot involving Barney (Sylvester Stallone) and his team losing a mission objective and a teammate to Van Damme's villain (actually, hilariously called Vilain) and resolving to "Track 'em, find 'em, kill 'em." somewhere in an Eastern Europe where the women wear shawls and scarves and the men model flat caps. Along the way, other mercenaries randomly pop up, having happened to be in the area (Norris' Booker gets Morricone's The Good the Bad and the Ugly as his theme) and trade groan-inducing, self-referencing one -liners (one exchange between Schwarzenegger and Willis involves both "I'll be back" and "Yippee-ki-yay") while blasting mercenary bad guys with semi-automatic weaponry, often without bothering to take cover. One cliche of '80s action cinema this film lovingly embraces is the hero standing in the open, spraying bullets at bad guys. Director West composes his shots nicely and his sequences are clear, efficient, and often exciting, if never quite inspired, and the story gives all of the heroes something to do; Jason Statham gets a church-set takedown of a team of bad guys, complete with awful one-liner and a somewhat disappointing climactic one-on-one with Adkins, while Stallone and Van Damme have their own final bout, and Lundgren, Couture and Crews mostly get the comedic material. Jet Li pops up briefly in the prologue but gets one nice action scene involving frying pans. None of them are particularly good, but then they have little to do beyond posing and cracking jokes. As such, Van Damme, Crews and Lundgren perhaps fare best, suggesting some life beyond what we see onscreen. That they are all playing action figures is largely taken for granted; this films attempts at drama are perfunctory and brief, always rushing off to the next bad gag or massive explosion. On that basis, it is sometimes fun, but also a little too generic emptily slick, and unmemorable.

BLITZ

(Elliott Lester, 2011) It is perhaps a little surprising that films as utterly generic as Blitz still get made. That may be unfair. While the main plot thread here is unbelievably familiar and dull in genre terms - a gruff, uncompromisingly violent Detective hunts a maniacal serial killer on a cop-killing spree - the proliferation of sub-plots suggest an entirely different, more interesting film. Unfortunately, all they do is suggest. Set in a London captured by director Lester as a grimy, coldly magnificent concrete metropolis - he shoots architecture far more sensitively than he does people - it initially seems like a Jason Statham vehicle-by-numbers. The first scene finds Statham's Detective Brant witness some teen thugs attempting to break into a car outside his flat in the middle of the night. Of course he picks up a hurl - an excuse for the screenplay to pay some tribute to the source novel, by Irish crime author Ken Bruen, as Brant lectures the criminals on hurling being an Irish game mixing "hockey and murder" - and ventures out to inflict some punishment. But Statham, while undoubtedly the lead character, is only given a shade more screen time than the others who crowd the narrative here; Paddy Considine's Detective Nash, who wins Brant's grudging respect as a cop despite being "a poofter", Zawe Ashton's crackhead young PC Falls, Mark Rylance as a newly widowed Police Commander, and of course Aidan Gillen, never less than utterly over the top as the killer, Weiss. Then there are name actors in even smaller parts; Luke Evans as a Detective who gets involved with Falls and David Morrissey as a tabloid hack contacted by the killer. That all makes the film - a snappy 97 minutes - a thoroughly overstuffed bird, struggling to finish it's story lines and sacrificing any depth in, well, all of them. The cop vs killer plotline gets more time than anything else, but even then it feels thin, lacking the emotional weight or even narrative hook which might make it interesting. As it is, Gillen's charismatic hamming and Statham's reliable action-lead brooding make it merely watchable as we wait fortheir ultimate showdown. Considine, one fine monologue aside, is largely wasted along with everybody else. The action scenes are few - this is a thriller, not an action film - but nicely handled, and the whole thing is reassuringly slick and expensive-looking. What it reminded me of was Danny Cannon's forgotten Young Americans; an audition piece, awkwardly grafting American genre cliches onto a British base with questionable results.

SAFE

(Boaz Yakin, 2011)

More than a cut above the average Jason Statham vehicle, Safe works in it's own right as a gritty, 1970s-style action thriller. That it makes such good use of Statham's particular brand of glowering machismo and brutal fighting style only makes it a more satisfying genre experience.
Statham plays Luke Wright, a cage fighter who incurs the wrath of the Russian Mob. As a result, his wife is murdered and he is left alive, but told that anyone he get close to will be executed, that he must wander alone. Over a year later, and by now virtually a bum and on the brink of suicide, Luke sees an 11-year Chinese girl pursued through the New York Subway by the same Russian mobsters responsible for his wife's death. She is a maths genius with some important numbers locked within her head, and by saving her, Luke involves himself in a gang war between the Russians, corrupt New York cops and Chinese. Only, of course, as Luke begins to pummel and blast his way through opponents, we learn that he is far more than just another cage fighter.
Writer-director Boaz Yakin has some form in genre cinema, having written The Rookie, The Punisher (1989) and Prince of Persia. His directorial debut, the outstanding Fresh, was an interesting, enthralling spin on the crime genre. Aside from that work, he has mostly made dramas, and I think that Safe really benefits from his flexibility and experience away from the narrow confines of generic expectation.
His approach to some genre tropes is often interesting, and suggests the work of a filmmaker who understands his genre but is seeking to push against it's stylistic boundaries. He handles the exposition of the first act, for instance, with a series of interlocking, often elliptical flashbacks, which establish characters and move the plot along nicely. Later he stages two action scenes from within cars, so that all we can see of the gunmen outside is snatched, chaotic reflections in the rearview mirror (scenes reminiscent of Miss Bala). The final one-on-one confrontation is played as a direct snub to the expectations of this sort of film.
But Yakin also understands the appeal of Statham and puts it to use. His early slow-burn scenes work brilliantly, because we know exactly what will happen later. Then when it does happen, Yakin finds a happy medium between the coherence and stability of classic fight cinema and the modern love of hyperactive fast-cutting. These scenes are always clear - you can see exactly what Statham is doing - but they have the bruising impact audiences have been taught to expect since the Bourne films revolutionised the way action is shot too. Statham's performance is solid. He never gives much away beyond anger and a certain cold-hearted kick-ass relish for the fight at hand, but he manages the few gags he gets easily.
And yet for all its few jokes, Safe has more of an emotional kick than his work usually manages, due mostly to his relationship with the girl, which is gently played on both sides.
The surprising intensity of that emotional content is matched by the grit of the portrayal of New York City, here shown in the sort of street-level crime story more common in the 1970s. There are car chases along its avenues, massive gun battles in its streets and hotels (a casino shootout recalls and perhaps betters Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon), and fistfights in its bars and subway cars. The City is a character here, refreshing in an era when Cleveland and Vancouver often stand in for Manhattan. Another slightly retro touch is Mark Mothersbaugh's terrific score, which apes and updates Lalo Schifrin's 1970s work to fabulous effect,
But really, this is a Statham vehicle, and as such it must work as a Statham vehicle; meaning that it should be ludicrous, over the top and full of fighting, explosions and general mayhem.
That it does all that and works on it's own terms too is a tribute to some fine work from writer-director Yakin. Lets hope it's not long before he decides to handle genre material again.

THE MECHANIC

(Simon West, 2011)

Proudly a b-movie to the core, the way in which this Jason Statham vehicle understands the nature of its stars appeal is the key to its success. Statham is a slightly underrated actor who has been good in some more demanding roles, but he is more-or-less unmatched in current cinema as a brooder. In many of his action parts, he plasters on a grumpy scowl, exudes physical menace, struts about, full of shaven-headed machismo, growls tough-guy lines in his mid-Atlantic whisper, then kicks the hell out of people. Best not to ask him for too much emotion or even dialogue. His presence is refreshingly simple and lacking in irony. He's like Bruce Willis without the humour. Such simplicity is best suited to a certain kind of film; ideally the stripped-back, streamlined directness of a b-movie action film.
The Mechanic is just such a film. Its set-up is clear: Statham plays Bishop, a cool assassin who is devoted to professionalism. But after accepting the assignment to kill hs only friend and mentor, he weakens somewhat and takes on his friend's disappointment of a son as a protege, showing him the Hitman ropes. But of course that only leads to further conflict down the road..
Director Simon West has steered enough mega-budget blockbusters through the studio system wringer to understand what works in the action genre, and his assured touch makes The Mechanic a smooth ride. It is also disarming beautiful in places, full of lush sunsets and city skylines against coppered horizons, while the action scenes all deliver; each a brutal, nicely shot and edited piece of pure visceral impact, the kind of thing Stathham excels at.
Ben Foster adds another damaged and vulnerable loser to his growing collection, and he helps the movie to function, while also starting in a couple of terrifyingly bruising set-pieces; while Donald Sutherlands early appearance is perhaps the highlight of the entire film, dramatically speaking of course.
The script is clipped and intent upon its own momentum, so that Bishop has no back-story and is defined more or less purely by what he does. Which is probably as I should be in a Statham film.