Jason Statham’s favourite Jason Statham movies: “The rest is shite”
A certain degree of self-awareness is required to succeed in Hollywood, and based on his filmography, it would appear that actors don’t come much more self-aware than Jason Statham.
There’s playing to type, and then there’s him. Ever since Cory Yuen’s The Transporter gave him his first leading role in an action movie more than 20 years ago, Statham has repeated the formula in almost every single one of his films. Remarkably, people don’t seem to be getting bored with it, either.
In fact, Statham is so self-aware that he gave one of the best performances of his career in Paul Feig’s Spy by playing a standard Jason Statham character, albeit one who worked incredibly well within the context of a stupid espionage comedy because the star’s Rick Ford took himself every bit as seriously as almost every other part he’s played since 2002.
He’s become so synonymous with one highly specific form of cinema, namely, mid-budget action thrillers where he plays a former military or law enforcement officer drawn out of exile, retirement, or back into the fray for ‘one last job’ to thwart a threat against himself or his family, that audiences can spot a standard Statham vehicle from a mile away because they’ve all pretty much got the same title.
It’s either one word or two, as long as the other word is ‘The’. The Transporter trilogy, London, Chaos, Crank, War, The Beekeeper, The Expendables franchise, Blitz, Parker, Hummingbird, Homefront, and many more are as Statham-y as it gets because they tick every single box mentioned above and basically no others.
It’s kept him gainfully employed and constantly in demand for nearly a quarter of a century, so why stop now? Most of his films are profitable, and the majority of them are resoundingly mediocre, but nobody can say with a straight face that Statham doesn’t have an inbuilt set of fans who’ll turn up every time he busts some heads. Ironically, most of the pictures he called his favourites don’t fit the bill.
“I really enjoyed working with Guy Ritchie,” he told Esquire. “One, it gave me a career, and two, they’re probably a couple of the best films I’ve ever done. I thought The Bank Job was a really quality movie. Even working with Luc Besson and doing The Transporter, one and two: pretty good. The Crank movie, I thought that was decent. The rest is shite.”
Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch were street-level crime thrillers, The Bank Job was a heist flick based on a true story, and Crank was more like a demented video game brought to life than a straightforward actioner, making the first two Transporters the Stathamiest of his personal favourites.
Obviously, he was only joking when he said the rest of his back catalogue was crap. “A movie, it’s like a very complicated timepiece,” he added. “There’s a lot of wheels in a watch. And some of those wheels, if they don’t turn right, then, you know, the watch ain’t gonna tell the time.” It’s a surprisingly philosophical way of admitting he’s made a lot of shite, but he doesn’t actually think everything apart from those six count. Or does he?
