Jason Statham has 56 credits on imdb.com. I've seen exactly half of them. Which makes me wonder how I missed the other half.
Gotta stop wasting time on things like sleep. And food.
Wish I could remember the TV series — In Plain Sight? Justified? — where one cop says to another, what'd you think of Downton Abbey (or some such) and the other guy shakes his head and says, "Not enough Jason Statham."
That about covers it for me. There hasn't been a movie made that wouldn't improve with the casting of Jason Statham, up to and including Gone With the Wind. If Jason Statham ever looks at you and says, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," you better duck for cover — the bullets are flying!
So what are my favorite Jason Statham performances? Glad you asked! (And if you didn't ask, you have my permission to skip down to the voting.) Here's a list of my top seven (a nice, even number). These are not limited to movies he headlines — he's often better in support and my list reflects that.
7. The Beekeeper (2024) — The distilled essence of a Jason Statham B-picture, here he plays a retired commando, lying low as a handy man who likes to keep bees. When his kindly landlady (Phylicia Rashad) commits suicide after getting fleeced by a network of scam artists, he sets out to get his revenge. You do not want to make this guy mad — by comparison, Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry looks like a volunteer for the Peace Corps. I could have picked any number of Jason Statham action pictures here — The Transporter 1, 2 or 3, Crank, The Mechanic and its sequels, Parker, etc. — but this is the most stylish of the bunch.
6. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) — Jason Statham came late to the neverending Fast & Furious franchise which has gotten more and more ludicrous (which is to say better) as it has gone along. I'll let Hobbs & Shaw stand in for all of them. Jason Statham as Deckard Shaw and Dwayne Johnson as Luke Hobbs are frenemies who must join forces to retrieve a deadly virus from an ex-MI6 agent (Idris Elba) who's gone into business for himself. The plot is beside the point — the pleasure here is watching the chemistry between Statham and Johnson, the Tracy and Hepburn of the Fast & Furious movies (I'll let you decide which is who).
5. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) — The first of director Guy Ritchie's Cockney gangster comedies. A lot of Tarantino and Elmore Leonard in its DNA, but also uniquely well-acquainted with the London underworld. The story revolves around a rigged card game, a half-million pound debt, a heist, a pair of antique shotguns, bags of cash, bags of drugs, shootouts, beatings, kidnappings, a traffic warden, and so many twists and turns, there's no point in trying to keep track. Like God, Guy Ritchie works in mysterious ways and he'll explain himself in his own good time. Or not. Statham in his first screen role, plays a friend of the duped card player, loyal, true, and like most criminals, only half as smart as he thinks he is.
4. The Bank Job (2008) — Statham heads up a crew of thieves who tunnel into a bank vault over a long London weekend. Based on a true story, what they find there rocks the British establishment. Statham plays a family man living the straight life but who agrees to do a favor for a friend. Intricate plot, lots of twists, and plenty of period 1971 detail. Note: I could have gone here with the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, which stars Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton and Donald Sutherland. Another nifty heist picture with Statham playing Handsome Rob in solid support.
3. Wrath of Man (2021) — I generally prefer funny Jason Statham to serious Jason Statham but this serious Jason Statham is terrific. He's a father grieving the loss of his son killed during an armored car heist. But of course he's more than that — he's Jason Statham! What, you were expecting Steel Magnolias? Co-starring Josh Harnett, Andy Garcia, Eddie Marsan and Jeffrey Donovan. Directed by Guy Ritchie, it's must-see Jason Statham, but a word of warning: make sure you go into this one with the right expectations. There's none of the usual humor to lighten the mood or relieve the tension.
2. Snatch (2000) — Snatch is the (barely) more comprehensible follow-up to Guy Ritchie's surprise hit, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It's another Cockney gangster comedy and it's even better than the first, with an all-star cast that includes Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Vinnie Jones — and of course, Jason Statham. The plot revolves around ... oh, who cares. What you want to watch is the interaction between Brad Pitt — playing a bare-knuckle boxer with an accent so thick even the Brits need subtitles — and Jason Statham who desperately needs this loose cannon to hit what he aims at. I think you could argue this is the best film on Ritchie's résumé (which also includes the aforementioned Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Sherlock Holmes, its sequel A Game of Shadows, The Man from Uncle, The Gentlemen, Wrath of Man, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare).
1. Spy (2015) — Not the best movie Jason Statham was ever in, but his best performance. A spoof of every James Bond movie ever made, Spy stars Melissa McCarthy as a CIA desk-jockey who winds up in the field on the trail of a stolen nuclear warhead. Statham's character, Rick Ford — described in the press kit as a cross between Rambo and Inspector Clouseau — is a perfect send-up of every character the actor has ever played and while he's almost always wryly funny, it's a shock just how great he is at straight up comedy. With Rose Byrne, Jude Law and Allison Janney.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Ted 2 turns out to be my answer to a meme floating around the internet a couple of years ago — name a movie you like released since 2000 that scored less than 50% (i.e., was panned by most critics) on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer.
This turned out to be much tougher than I anticipated, largely because I rarely bother to see movies that have been critically panned. I counted only thirty-nine movies with a "splat" rating that I've even seen — forget liked — and only twelve of those in the theater. What can I tell you? I never go to a movie on its opening weekend, I pay attention to the critical buzz, and I trust my gut when I see the preview. It's like those commercials for Cici's Pizza — if it looks bad when people are being paid to make it look good, it's probably terrible.
Anyway, of those movies, Ted 2 is the only one that almost made my annual top ten. Sure, it stars a foul-mouthed, dope-smoking teddy bear, but it has some clever things to say about what it means to be a human being, and the dangers of treating some of those beings as less human than others. If its brilliant second act hadn't been done in by an utterly inane third, I would have nominated it for best picture. Check it out.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Sometimes you read a satire so biting, you just have to share it. To wit, from Richard Brody's movie column in the January 6, 2016 New Yorker:
What endures for the critics and their lay associates, for aesthetes who live for the beauty and the pleasure of movies, is [George] Lucas’s directing—of two films, “Attack of the Clones” and, especially, “Revenge of the Sith.” If Lucas had done nothing else in his life, he’d have an honored place in my personal pantheon for that work.
After twenty years, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are letting our subscription to the New Yorker magazine lapse. Richard Brody's comments about George Lucas have nothing to do with it, but close enough.
By the way, we very much enjoyed the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens. It's fun the way they used to be fun nearly forty years ago now. That there are people, including George Lucas himself, who don't like it for that very reason is explanation enough for how the franchise ran seriously off the rails in the dismal prequel years.
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
After getting shutout of a sold-out performance Saturday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I drove back down to the AFI-Silver on Sunday to see the eighth film of Quentin Tarantino's illustrious career, aptly titled The Hateful Eight. Tarantino resurrected the long-abandoned Panasonic Ultra 70 film format, the same ultra-widescreen process used on the 1959 classic Ben-Hur (indeed, the film was shot with the same lens used to shoot the chariot race), and for one week only has released it in 98 theaters as an old-school roadshow engagement, complete with overture, intermission and commemorative program.
Just the way they used to make 'em in my childhood.
The story is essentially a three-hour retelling of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None in a Wild West setting. A motley crew of bounty hunters, war veterans, cow punchers, an Englishman with a fascination for the niceties of public executions and a gallows-bound Jennifer Jason Leigh wind up riding out a blizzard in a strangely-deserted general store deep in the trackless nowhere of a very empty Wyoming. They sit by the fire, drink coffee and talk, talk, talk.
And then when the talking is through, the blood and the bullets start flying.
Stripped of the filigree, this is the plot of every Quentin Tarantino movie ever made.
If you know and love Tarantino the way we do, you know you're in for a banquet of ornate oratory, digressions and shaggy dog stories that for someone eager to get to the point I suppose must be maddening. But I'll tell you right out, I like listening to a man who likes to talk and The Hateful Eight stars some of the great talkers of screen history.
Kurt Russell is the bounty hunter determined to see Jennifer Jason Leigh swing, Samuel L. Jackson is another bounty hunter lugging three dead bodies and a letter from Abraham Lincoln through waist-deep snow, Walton Goggins as a would-be sheriff finally gets a big screen role worthy of his silver-tongued talents, Tim Roth as the hangman channels Eric Blore in Top Hat, Bruce Dern is a broken-down Civil War general, and Michael Madsen is a passing cowboy who says he's just headed home to visit his dear old ma.
For such an out-of-the-way place, this deserted cabin starts to seem a bit like Grand Central Terminal. With the emphasis on "terminal."
This is Tarantino, and you know at some point you're going to get a bloodbath worthy of a 1970s horror movie, violence so over-the-top it has an innocence about it, like something a demented preschooler might doodle in his hymn book during a long, boring church sermon. As I put it in an e-mail to my good pal Mister Muleboy, "it's a 3-hour gabfest ... directed by a drunk Sam Peckinpah right after he'd seen John Carpenter's The Thing."
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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