Stardom: Fast, furious, and forever underrated — find out why Jason Statham is Britain’s greatest movie star, and why he is pretty much unbeatable at what he does.
Why is Jason Statham pretty much unbeatable at what he does? Let’s start with the hair.
The 49-year-old’s stubbled pate is vital to his appeal, so fixed an aspect of his now-unsinkable brand that a Stath character accessorises at his peril. There are one or two films in which a long, straggly wig is initially sported — Hummingbird (2013) and Homefront (2013), for instance.
If these vehicles understand their star in the slightest, they must abide by the eternal law of Statham’s Wig, which is an exact inverse of Chekhov’s Gun. After the first act, it must vanish and never be seen again, ideally in a slow-motion clipper montage to show him cleaning up his act.
In Fast & Furious 8, Statham comprises 1/3 of action cinema’s baldestever triumvirate. Watching him square off with Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel is like pausing a snooker match two shots shy of a 147 break. If that weren’t enough, a baby is added to the mix, which genuinely looks like it’s beating their sum of skull coverage. Statham and baby — it’s Vin Diesel’s infant, but you can hardly expect it to tell the difference — dance their way through explosions in the mid-air climax, and steal the film together with such comic grace they deserve a whole spin-off unto themselves, perhaps with “Farts” in the title.
Statham’s recruitment into the hotrod saga may be giving him easily his biggest box office paydays, but he’s racked up a good couple of dozen profitable films in his time — generally by keeping the overheads low and the formula basic. He’s disciplined, knows his brand, and has a simmering, low-key star power which makes it easy to underrate him: exports from Sydenham, or indeed Great Britain, have rarely made it so big.
One more thing on the hair. There are films that broke the law, and these are heresies — among Statham’s worst ever. Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (2005) has many, many ideas above its ludicrous station, but the lank, black hairpiece atop its leading man is somehow an instant totem of its pretentiousness. It’s just wrong.
Absolutely no one, meanwhile, has seen Statham’s contribution to the low-budget US indie London (also 2005 — not a good year), but a Google Image check is possible on the Willis-in-Sixth-Sense-toupeemanquée involved, and it explains more or less everything.
Statham knows by now that his stardom depends on keeping certain things robust and simple. To this end, his film titles contain as few words as possible, ideally just the one. (He actually made one called The One. It’s awful.) He’s down with definite pronouns. But you’ll never catch him in An Anything or Being Anything or any of that nonsense. He favours jobs: The Transporter (2002). The Mechanic (2011). The Bank Job (2008). Spy (2015). His men of action have sellable skills, and advertise them with the bare minimum of fuss or verbiage. Rather like the man himself.
Statham doesn’t much like doing interviews, but once in a while a film needs his help — the underseen Hummingbird was one such, neogumshoe Actor Jason Statham drama Parker (2013) another. During these brief promotional interludes, he comes out and explains himself, revealing a career plan guided, as much as anything, by common sense. “You can’t have a sushi restaurant and then put cheese on toast on the menu,” he told the Guardian.
In his own films, the reverse is doubtless true, but he meant this to excuse his absence from work by rarefied auteurs. Take Todd Haynes: you wouldn’t catch Statham dead in a film called Carol, Velvet Goldmine, or I’m Not There. He is always very much There. (His 2012 Safe is not a remake.)
Since his first dreams of being a stunt man, Statham has knuckled down to the physical side of his job with uncomplaining graft, and loves learning new tricks. He dropped his body fat to an amazing 6% to get fit for Death Race (2008). Before he was an actor, he reached a peak, trivia fans, as the world’s 12th best diver, only to have his Olympics dashed in the early 1990s.
And there remains a bucket list, as he told Men’s Fitness. “There’s one thing that I’ve never tried to do and that’s fly one of those wing [suits] [ ...] off a cliff and do that proximity flying where they take a layer of skin off their chin by flying close to the rocks.” While some of us dust off Anthony Trollope, he’ll get on with this.
What keeps Statham bankable is a rigorous approach to his action heroics which never gets too self-serious, but also doesn’t flag up its self-mockery. He’s reliably poker-faced. Compared with his Fast 8 co-star Johnson, who’s in danger of getting too outsized in every way — overdoing the muscles, mugging to camera, practically crooning to his fan-base mid-film — Statham keeps his cool. Theirverbalspatshaveanamusingly homoerotic edge, but Johnson is the oneplayinguptoitall,strainingtobe declared a camp icon. hopes
IfyouaskedStathamwhatacamp icon was, he’d sketch you a tent, with a slight smile. Flamboyance isn’t his bread and butter, whatever happened in the pre-fame days. If you showed him the music video for Erasure’s Run to the Sun (1994), say, which features him gyrating in silver body paint on top of the World Clock in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, or the even more spectacular sight of him heavily oiled, in leopard-print pants, cavorting all over The Shamen’s godawful Comin’ On (1993) promo, he’d just fix you one of his looks.
Easily the most delightful thing in the Beautiful South’s cheesy video for Dream a Little Dream, on the French Kiss (1995) soundtrack, is Statham. It’s full of couples canoodling in a cinema with French Kiss showing, and there, for a fraction of a second, watching French Kiss on a date at 1:21, is Statham.
Because of his patented stoicism, barely the slightest shift was required for Statham to enter “funny” mode in Spy. (He’s just as funny in Fast & Furious 8.) Everyone responded to that turn as an act of joyful self-parody, but you could probably find out-takes from all his other performances with the same degree of wink and hubris — there’s hardly a flicker of difference between “serious” Statham and the spoofy kind.
Certainly Crank (2006), his most brazen exploitation-y gamble and riotous cult success, let him whack tongue violently into cheek. But he has a perfect instinct for not going overboard, even when his films do.
Statham spent some formative years as a fly-pitcher, hawking knock-off watches on London’s street corners, much as his dad had done. Interviewers love a link between this vocation and doing what he now does: selling the right product to the right consumer, even if it’s fallen off the back of a van, and getting decent money for his troubles.
When Guy Ritchie first spotted him, modelling for French Connection, it was the director’s lucky day more than Statham’s. He got only £5,000 for debuting in Lock, Stock (1998), upped to £15,000 for Snatch (2000). But he was so clearly the shrewd, charismatic centre of those films that producers flocked to him.
Within two years one of them was Luc Besson, and he had the lead action role — in the nifty, laconic, knows-exactly-what-it’s-doing The Transporter — which has given him a template ever since. Fast driving, loud killing, proper stunts, and not too much dialogue. Or at least offload it on some other poor slag.
Statham has feisty views on stunt work, actually, and has said in the past he thinks an Oscar category should exist for it, to applaud some of the hardest-working guys in the business. He has also slammed the over-reliance on CGI in the Marvel universe, causing us to wonder if he’s actually made it through all three Expendables films.
Where possible, he likes to do it all himself: that’s really him hanging out of a helicopter 2,000 feet above L.A., at the end of Crank. And that’s really him, um, attacking Kim Basinger’s neck with a belt in Cellular (2004), without giving her prior notice, because she said she wasn’t feeling scared enough. A warning to us all.
Perhaps it’s the relative unimportance of quality control that has given the Statham career such legs. He’s under no illusions about the fluctuating entertainment value of his films — while too gentlemanly to disparage particular scripts, he has his favourites, and knows where the baseline is.
He’s loyal to Ritchie about their first two, knows Crank is a hoot, is rather partial to The Bank Job. (For me, The Mechanic, 2011’s Blitz, Hummingbird and Homefront all have some grit to match their pulp, and Death Race, though entirely ludicrous, is one of Paul W.S. Anderson’s better knock-offs.)
Never assume, either, that he’s merely scraping by with the mortgage payments. Thanks to a lot of smart investments and residuals, he has a net worth of at least $40 million.Hedidnotlaunchhisownmale fragrance range, as Den of Geek reported once on April 1st, but did get engaged to Rosie HuntingtonWhiteley last year. Amid all their entrepreneurial jet-setting, what do they get up to for leisure? “We get drunk and float around the swimming pool,” he told Esquire.
There is almost no Statham pensée that is not 200-proof Statham. “If the movie shoots in February, you’ve got a lot of trouble,” he declares, mindful of seasonal bloat. “I f ***** g love cars” is a good one. “Writing is not a skill I possess, unfortunately,” he has also said, in typically self-deprecating fashion.
But — let’s see. He can high-dive, kickbox, do whatever the verb is for jiu-jitsu,beunderstatedlysexy,drive at insanely dangerous speeds, act well, play football well, dance in his pants like a total champ as long as you don’t tell anyone, and genuinely jump onto school buses from jetskis, if you insist. It’s quite some portfolio. And no one, least of all him, is getting tired of it yet.