“A slippery slope”: the 2002 movie Jason Statham regrets for one reason
In much the same way that you can put bacon into any recipe you’re making and it will not just work but make everything better, Jason Statham can now be placed into almost any scenario in a movie, and it will make complete sense.
Whether he’s doing a spot of beekeeping, or sitting on the bottom of the Pacific ocean in a submarine, or working on fixing cars, you can be guaranteed that should someone he even mildly cares about get into a spot of peril, then he will be ready to quickly pack a variety of tools into a duffle bag and jump into an old Jeep ready to start cracking skulls.
This year will see him back on the water, only without massive sharks to concern him, as he stars in another Sky production following on from 2024’s The Beekeeper. This one is called Mutiny, and sees Statham on board a cargo ship, on a one-man crusade to… Oh, look who cares what the plot is, all we want is to watch him dispatch goons in all manner of creative ways, and no doubt that is exactly what we’ll get.
He will barely say anything (he only had 12 lines in the entirety of The Beekeeper), he will work his way through a variety of bad guys until he meets one that’s bigger than the other ones, that one will put up more of a fight, and injure Statham, but he will still be defeated in the end. At which point our hero will sail off somewhere, while leaving things open to a second movie. That’s how it works, but it works, and so we’ll still watch and enjoy it.
The Statham menu of success has not changed for over 20 years now, and why should it? The only issue with it is that the British action star has been doing most of his own stunts throughout that time, and he is now knocking on the door of 60, at which point things are going to have to start to take their toll.
Statham doesn’t blame anyone but himself for the longevity of his physical endeavours, however, because he wanted the control of doing most of the fighting and jumping himself all the way back in the early 2000s at the start of one of his most popular franchises.
He admitted, “I did (2002 action film) Transporter with Luc Besson, and I ended up doing pretty much everything. So, from that day forth, it was a slippery slope to try and change things – until I couldn’t.”
The Transporter saw Statham as a former special ops soldier (surprise!) who transports packages and people for illegal undertakings and was a decent-sized success on release, followed by two sequels that made more than $200million combined at the box office. It was Statham’s first lead role in a movie, and it showed that he was a presence ready to step up to the likes of Jet Li and eventually Bruce Willis and Sly Stallone as an action hero who could carry a film globally.
As well as Mutiny, which hits cinemas in August this year, Statham fans are going to have plenty more of him knocking heads together in the next couple of years, because a Beekeeper 2 is on the way, as well as Guy Ritchie’s throwback movie Viva La Madness and another Fast and Furious movie in which Statham will return as Deckard Shaw, no doubt swapping Bic razor tips with The Rock and Vin Diesel.
