Jason Statham names his favourite action movie
For over 20 years, Jason Statham has been one of the most prolific and popular action heroes Hollywood has at its disposal, even if silver-screen stardom was never really on his mind until he was bitten by the acting bug.
He may have been practising martial arts since childhood, but his heart wasn’t set on using those skills in cinema from a young age. Instead, competitive diving took precedence, with Statham competing for England at the 1990 Commonwealth Games before a combination of a burgeoning modelling career and history as a salesman of legally questionable goods saw him make his acting debut in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Soon after, Hollywood came calling, with Corey Yuen’s The Transporter inadvertently laying the groundwork for an entire subgenre when he cast Statham as the lead of a mid-budget action movie for the very first time. More specifically, he hired him to play a veteran of the military and/or law enforcement headlining a film with either a one-word title or a two-word moniker prefixed by “The”, which became the template the star has adhered to ever since.
London, Chaos, Crank, War, The Mechanic, Blitz, Safe, Parker, Hummingbird, Homefront, The Meg, and The Beekeeper are just some of the titles to have adopted the formula, while his contributions to The Expendables and Fast & Furious franchises continued to elevate his star even higher.
Despite displaying his martial arts prowess dozens of times over the years, though, Statham has never appeared in a martial arts film, at least by the strictest definition of the term. And yet, as he revealed to Rotten Tomatoes, one of the artform’s most iconic examples served as his biggest influence.
“If we want to talk about the movies that have made an impact in what I do in the action realm – Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. I’ve watched that countless times,” he explained. “That is a standalone pioneer in action movies, and anyone that was inspired by Bruce Lee… I’m sure everyone that has ever done an action movie has just drooled over how full of talent Bruce Lee was, and how unique he was”.
Recalling his astonishment at Lee being “so avant-garde, he’s years above, so far ahead of his own time”, Statham included himself as one of the people who “try to emulate him in whatever way they can”. Almost any actor who performs martial arts on-screen on a regular basis owes at least one small debut of gratitude to the legendary Lee, and Statham is more than happy to admit he’s among them.
He probably didn’t imagine he’d experience such longevity as an action hero the first time he saw Enter the Dragon, but its fingerprints have been all over his filmography ever since he first roundhouse kicked some poor disposable henchman square in the face.
