Matthew Lillard’s favourite Jason Statham movie: “One of the quintessential worst films ever made”
Jason Statham has made a lot of terrible films, and if you’re in the mood for atrocious action movies, then he’s got them by the bucketful.
Cheesy dialogue, ridiculous action sequences, a Cockney accent so thick you could use it as cement, it’s all there, and chuck in The Meg, Gnomeo & Juliet, and the rest of his utterly bonkers filmography, and you’re guaranteed to find something that’s so bad it’s good.
To give the gruff egg some credit, it’s not all bad; his early work with Guy Ritchie mostly holds up, especially Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which might be the director’s best film, and then there’s his very brief role in Michael Mann’s Collateral as ‘Airport Man’, which still counts, but do we care about any of those hits? Nope, and neither does Matthew Lillard.
In an interview with Den of Geek, the star of Scooby-Doo and Scream was asked about his preferred Statham offering, for which Lillard went above and beyond, revealing that he had actually been in a film with the man himself.
“I’m going to say my favourite Jason Statham movie is In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, one of the quintessential worst films ever made,” he said, “I would go to work, and we’d have fighting practice and acting rehearsal, and it was like two weeks of warrior chaos. It was fantastic.”
When asked to justify his choice, he simply said, “Ray Liotta was in leather trousers, and that’s all you have to say. Amazing”.
Inspired by the Dungeon Siege series of video games, In the Name of the King stars ‘The Stath’ as Farmer, a man on a quest to rescue his wife and avenge the death of his son. The British baldie, whom Lillard described as “fantastic”, wasn’t the only major name to lend their visage to this fantasy adventure, for alongside Lillard and Liotta, the movie also stars Jonathan Rhys-Davis, Ron Perlman, and Burt Reynolds, the latter of whom almost died in an on-set accident.
Reynolds probably wished he had perished when he saw the reviews, as In the Name of the King was absolutely slaughtered by critics; not only was it labelled one of the worst films of the year and one of the worst video game adaptations ever, it also appeared in some lists of the worst movies of the entire decade.
On reflection, nobody should have been that surprised, for this was the brainchild of serial slop-server Uwe Boll, who was, in Lillard’s own words, “a treat”. Boll couldn’t make a good movie if his life depended on it and was honoured with the coveted ‘Worst Director’ prize at that year’s Razzies, while the film itself was nominated five times in total.
Lillard couldn’t care less, though; he got to hang out with Statham, almost watch Reynolds die, and muck about with a sword for several weeks, so who gives a rat’s ass if the film was any good?
