The Comic Fury of Jason Statham

In his '00s prime, the 'Crank' movies helped crystallize the appeal of the stone-faced action star.

“Jason Statham has never been in a great movie. He’s also never been in a boring one. Statham’s imdb.com profile, collectively, is a promise to you, the weary filmgoer. It’s a promise that says, ‘I promise that you will not FOR ONE SECOND be bored during one of my movies. You won’t learn shit about the human condition, or feel a collective connection with the brotherhood of man. But if you give me $10, I will fuck an explosion while a Slayer song plays.” — Patton Oswalt

It has been almost exactly 15 years since Patton Oswalt wrote this ode to Jason Statham—so long, in fact, that the source, a MySpace blog page, doesn’t exist anymore. And it seems possible that Oswalt might revise his opinion about Statham never being in a boring movie, though he did reference the action star again when writing about the grief he felt in losing his wife, Michelle McNamara, in 2016. The difference between then and now is that Statham has spent the last decade as a secondary or even tertiary piece of larger action franchises, playing Deckard Shaw in the sixth through tenth (and beyond) Fast & Furious movies—plus a forgettable spinoff, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw—and Lee Christmas in Sly Stallone’s old-action-guys revue The Expendables and its sequels. You can definitely say that Statham has still never been in a great movie, but plenty of those movies are boring. 

And yet there’s a moment in The Beekeeper, his new not-boring January movie, that taps into the specific appeal of Statham as a marquee favorite during his heyday in the ‘00s, when he used Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch as a springboard into B-level stardom. Playing a retired agent for a super-duper-secret deep-state organization called “The Beekeepers”—and taking his position literally enough to become an actual beekeeper after getting the proverbial gold watch—Statham’s Adam Clay decides to stand up for an elderly woman who takes her own life after losing her entire savings to a phishing scam. The company behind the scam is seemingly untouchable, as internet scam operations tend to be, with a network of call centers speckling office parks around the country. (That the call centers are in the U.S. is one of those suspend-your-disbelief notions.) 

Now, a more suave and sophisticated action hero would have to spend time casing this shadowy enterprise and infiltrating its hidden sanctums of power. But Clay simply shows up to a multi-story call center with two large cans of gasoline in the back of his pickup truck and informs two security guards that he intends to burn the place to the ground. That is a true Jason Statham moment, of the kind we haven’t seen since the movies were small enough for him to carve out his own place in them. And The Beekeeper, if nothing else, is a Proustian nibble of the explosion-fucking beast that Statham once was at the height of his power, a reminder of gruff comic appeal that makes him so unique. With both the Fast & Furious and The Expendables franchises on the downward slope, perhaps a career reboot is in the offing. 

In reflecting on Statham’s appeal, I went back and re-watched 2006’s Crank and 2009’s Crank: High Voltage, which didn’t come along until after his initial Richie films and the first two (of three) in The Transporter series, but crystallize his essence more than anything else he’s done. You could say that Statham follows a long tradition of mirthless, hyper-masculine action heroes, from Charles Bronson to Clint Eastwood to Liam Neeson, but that’s only half-true. He is, like those men, a cinder block who relentlessly crushes his foes on one vengeful mission or another, as unceasing in his pursuit as the “it” in It Follows. Yet Statham is also a wry parody of the British tough-guy archetype, the stone-faced center of movies that are deliberately, flagrantly ridiculous. He never quite winks at the audience, but his directors constantly do. 

Made on the cheap by first-timers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor—shortened as “Neveldine/Taylor” for credits and branding purposes—Crank introduces Statham as Chev Chelios, a British hitman in Los Angeles who’s in a life-threatening crisis from the second the film starts. In true Bond villain fashion, a rival crook named Ricky Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) chooses not to kill him outright, but instead inject him with a Chinese synthetic drug that will slow his heart to an eventual halt. The only thing that will keep him alive, according to his shady mafia surgeon (Dwight Yoakam, under a steady film of sweat), is a constant flow of adrenaline—like a shark, he needs to keep moving or he’ll die. But before he dies, he’s damn well determined to have his revenge on Ricky Verona first.