Jason Statham’s greatest on-screen kill, according to Jason Statham: “That’s a pretty gruesome one”
Imagine a world where if anyone even remotely annoys you or mildly inconveniences you, then you’re entirely allowed to dispatch them in a dramatic style.
A traffic warden gives you a ticket for being two minutes late back to your car? Roundhouse kick to the face. An officious post office clerk won’t take your parcel because it’s 50g too heavy? Bam, a vicious right-hander and down the old lady goes. And this is the world that Jason Statham inhabits.
Alright, so it might just be for his job given he is in the top five all-action movie pugilists and the star of many “literally what it says it is” movies including Mechanic and Transporter and Spy and lots of other films that only have one word in the title, but still, it counts.
Because if someone has the temerity to piss Statham off, or even really just piss someone off that he works for as, oh I don’t know, let’s say a plumber, then he will angrily growl a bit, pack up a bag, put on a flannel shirt and a trucker cap, climb into a beaten up old pick up truck that he’s parked behind a barn somewhere in the Deep South of America despite the fact he’s from Derbyshire, and off he will set, ready to unleash furious vengeance on whoever it is that’s been stupid enough to spoil his day.
Of course Statham doesn’t reserve his fury for just people that have upset him. Many giant sharks are now especially fearful of running into the shaven-headed tough guy thanks to his killing a Megalodon with a spear in The Meg. But mostly it’s humans that bear the brunt of a Statham attack, in all manner of inventive ways.
There was the infamous “buzz off” kill in The Beekeeper, in which Statham saws off an enemies’ fingers, attaches him and his truck to a cord and sends them off a bridge. Then there was the scene in Wild Card where Statham takes offence to losing at gambling by seeing a bad guy off with some cutlery. Not to mention cutting someone’s head off and drop-kicking it into a swimming pool as he did in Crank 2: High Voltage.
To those you can add crushing someone with a car lift, cutting someone’s hand off and then using said hand to fire a gun and kill them, pushing someone through a porthole then tipping the boat on them, and many, many more. Statham’s kill count is easily in the hundreds. Basically, don’t upset him or you will wind up very dead in a gruesome fashion.
Does the man himself have a favourite killing scene from his many movies though? Of course he does, as he revealed to Variety: “Oh, I have another spectacular kill! The one in Expendables 2 when … oh God, what’s his name? The one where I punch him into a helicopter, and he gets churned up by the rotor blades. That’s a pretty gruesome one, yeah.”
No doubt he’ll have plenty more such shenanigans in his upcoming movies too, which include a sequel to The Beekeeper, plus an action movie called Shelter in which he has to save a girl (surprise!) and another called Mutiny in which he is framed for the murder of a billionaire and goes on the run.
Just in case he gets tired of doing all the killing himself, he’ll also be appearing with The Rock and Vin Diesel in the latest Fast and Furious movie, Fast X: Part 2, which if it goes the way the rest of the series has been heading will be some kind of nuclear battle in the farthest depths of space.
