Jason Statham’s favourite movie musicals: “I grew up on them”
Everyone knows that Jason Statham is particularly proficient at smashing people in the face in a number of different ways, growling short lines of dialogue in a kind of New York-meets-Southend accent and appearing in movies that have a trade in the title, like The Mechanic and The Beekeeper and the brilliantly generic A Working Man. But can you imagine him twirling around belting out a tune or doing a tap dance routine? Neither can we.
But it seems that Statham is indeed a big fan of a showtune here and there, raised on a diet of some true classics of the genre, as he once revealed to Blackfilm, stating: “I used to watch musicals all the time when I was a kid. I loved Singing in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story. I grew up on them, my mom and dad were fanatics on musicals.”
A softer side to Statham might be a bit tough to imagine but the dancing element not so much; after all this is the man who kicked off his career in the early 1990s as a model and background dancer for some sizable acts of the time including The Shamen and Erasure.
As for the action man’s choice in classic musicals, his tastes can’t be faulted, really. Singing in the Rain is one of the finest films of all time after all, with possibly cinema’s most iconic scene in history as Gene Kelly twirled his umbrella on a rain-soaked street.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, meanwhile is a musical western from 1954 that’s full of dancing numbers during which the stars do all kinds of mundane activities like chopping wood and painting stuff. Despite there being a distinct lack of anyone getting their legs broken with hammers or having to have their heart resuscitated on a regular basis, Statham obviously still found enough in it to love.
And West Side Story is another truly iconic musical, the story of two sets of Manhattan gangs called the Jets and the Sharks and a forbidden love between them, inspired by Romeo and Juliet.
Written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, it was originally a Broadway production before being adapted into a film in 1961, which was a revelation, winning ten Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and becoming the highest-grossing musical of all time until The Sound of Music was released four years later.
Perhaps Statham expected the simmering tensions between the two warring gangs to explode into an orgy of violence perpetrated with an assortment of bats and guns rather than what actually happens, which is that each side clicks their fingers a lot and slowly approaches each other menacingly while constantly slicking their hair back with combs.
Indeed, Statham laments that not enough musicals are being made in the modern day, despite Steven Spielberg producing an entirely superfluous remake of West Side Story in 2021.
Statham said, “I don’t think they (musicals) work now, although the romantic-comedy side of me hasn’t been exposed… I don’t know why they’re not making them anymore. Can anyone answer that?”
Maybe Jason, it’s because rather than lavishly choreographed set pieces beautifully soundtracked by wondrously orchestrated pieces of rousing music, people want to watch endlessly rehashed 90-minute movies featuring chonky cockneys in baseball caps take on armies of faceless bad guys while saving the life of a kidnapped teenage girl who will inevitably be found in a barn somewhere in rural America.
