The genre Jason Statham wants nothing to do with: “We tend to stay away from it”
This week sees another round of Jason Statham carnage unleashed onto the cinemas of Great Britain in the form of Shelter, the plot points of which won’t surprise you unduly given they are ‘Statham is an elite operative turned recluse who has to rescue a girl and then fends off loads of bad guys’.
Do we know what the film is going to be like? Yes. Will it be fairly mindless fare with Statham dispatching people in a variety of gory and over-the-top ways? Yes. Will he have more than about ten lines in the whole thing? No. Will we still absolutely watch it and enjoy it? Hell yes.
The one unusual thing about Shelter for a Statham movie is that it is getting a full cinema release, something that hasn’t happened that often in later years, but the unforeseen success of 2024’s The Beekeeper has seen the shaven-headed hero back in the spotlight as a leading man who can get bums on seats and popcorn boxes in hands.
Maybe it’s down to the simplicity of it, you know what you’re going to get, it’s going to be done well, and it’s going to have a satisfying conclusion where the good guy wins and everyone’s safe. Or are they! We won’t know until the box office results dictate whether or not you’ll get a sequel. But the pleasing news is that The Beekeeper 2 is on the way, so we are definitely going to get more honey-handed mayhem on that count.
While Statham understandably sticks to action movies, because that’s what he’s known for and that’s what he’s best at, he has only really dipped a broken toe into the world of comedy once, and that was in the Melissa McCarthy and Jude Law 2015 movie Spy, which did get excellent reviews (although 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes seems excessive, that’s higher than Inception).
And he says there are reasons why he’s not looking to do many other rib-ticklers anytime soon, basically because there are plenty of comic actors who do it as well as can be. He said: “Usually the good stuff that comes from that genre is always going to the right people: Ben Stiller and all the people that are so good at it. The stuff that comes my way from those areas, it’s not so good, so we tend to stay away from it.”
Which makes perfect sense, we don’t want to watch Statham awkwardly stuttering in the rain while trying to get someone like Andie MacDowell to go on a date, we want to watch him tie a baddie to a car with a rope and then have that car drive straight off a bridge into a river.
Anyone who enjoys watching ‘The Stath’ hand out gruesome vigilante justice to Ne’er-do-wells will be delighted to know that he has no plans at 58 to start slowing down anytime soon, and aside from the buzz around the second Beekeeper movie he’s also completed filming on Mutiny (Statham framed for murder, goes on the run) and is confirmed to be in the cast of the latest Fast and Furious movie, Fast X: Part 2 along with Vin Diesel and The Rock and all the rest of those monosyllabic guys who look vaguely similar.
He has also started filming Guy Ritchie’s Viva La Madness, which Statham describes as “Very Snatch-esque” – a gangster movie from the pen of The Layer Cake’s JJ Connelly that will apparently also star the former bad footballer, now limited actor, Vinnie Jones.
