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seriousficAs if starring in a remake of a Charles Bronson film isn't enough, Jason Statham continues his streak of being the new Charles Bronson by now starring in a movie with a cute little Asian girl. But don't get him wrong. This isn't a Kindergarten Cop or a The Pacifier situation. He means business. Just cuz he lets her watch cartoons and stuff doesn't change his feelings on intact criminal body parts (he's against them).
Frankly, I like Statham being the new Charles Bronson. Sure, sometimes it's nice when a serious actor decides to play a badass, but other times, you see Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be a tough-as-nails military commando and it's just… c'mon, dude, we all know you weren't training to kill Ruskies when you were eighteen. You were telling Rose your heart would go on.
So having a badass actor who moonlights as a dramatic actor instead of the other way around… that's good. We could do with a few more. I think Gina Carono should be the female version of Jason Statham (the female version of this dramatic actor/badass actor being the "hot actress/badass actress" divide. I think Carono nicely straddles that line, and then puts a wrestling hold on it and chokes it out).
This, Statham's latest, tries to switch things up. I don't know if this is how Statham picks scripts, but a lot of his films seem to do that. The Mechanic had a surprisingly effective relationship going between Statham and Ben Foster. Killer Elite had the interesting concept that Statham couldn't just assassinate his targets, he had to make it look like accidents, until the very end when he decided he could just kill a guy and say "yeah, he got mugged or something, whatever." And the Crank movies are, well, Crank movies.
This time, the movie's a bit more self-aware than usual. It knows it's a B-movie, so it goes over-the-top in places, and it skips around the exposition to get to the point instead of drawing things out. I don't think they even cast someone as Statham's dead wife. They just have him call her on the phone saying "Honey, someone's going to kill you!", then later he looks off-screen and goes "Someone killed you!"
So what we end up with is a typical three-star Statham movie that's trying to be a four-star Statham movie, but it's a little too clever for its own good. It overthinks stuff, and that makes it dip toward two-star range. For instance, the movie ignores Chekov's well-known Law: If the Russian Mob kills the hero's wife in the first act, the hero must kill the Russian Mob in the third act. Instead, Statham lets the main Russian guy get away to stop the cycle of violence so he and the little girl can live in peace. I get what they're going for, showing that protecting the girl is more important than vengeance, but Statham never seems that interested in vengeance. They say out loud that he could've gotten his revenge at any point, he just didn't. So it seems more like Statham didn't really care about his pregnant wife who the bad guy killed and then bragged about killing.
Also, the bad guy sets it up so anyone Statham gets close to will get killed by the Russian Mob, which you'd think is the kind of thing that would immediately put Statham in roaring rampage of revenge mode, just to stop people from getting killed. Look, turn the other cheek is great and all, but that would apply more to someone killing Statham's wife in a car accident or something. This is more like Statham forgiving a serial killer. At the end, Statham even gives the criminals their money back instead of stealing it to donate to charity or something, so it seems like all this craziness really accomplished was inconveniencing the bad guys some.
Another thing is that for a movie that's trying to be four-stars, they half-ass it on the movie's central relationship. See, Statham is getting ready to commit suicide when he sees the little girl getting hassled, which moves him to intervene, save her life, beat up her pursuers, and in general star in an action movie. He takes her to a hotel room, they have one scene together which is mostly her giving him exposition, then the bad guys attack and capture him, so the rest of the movie is Statham trying to get her back.
See, that feels half-assed to me. I was expecting something more like Terminator 2, where there're a lot of scenes between the Terminator and John Connor, building the relationship and exploring that stuff. But they spend most of the movie apart, so it comes off a little presumptuous when Statham talks about how this girl saved his life and gave him a reason to live and stuff. Like, you knew her for five minutes. Don't make up your mind so fast. She might suck. You never know.
It almost becomes Nabokov-y, the way he assumes they have this deep, spiritual bond. Luckily, it turns out that her life sucks too and her parents are dead and she really does need a full-time guardian. But can you imagine if she was just a happy little schoolgirl who was nabbed off the street? He'd beat up the bad guys, she'd thank him, then she'd go back to her parents. Would he still be reading this big connection into her?
I know they were probably worried about having an annoying kid character gumming up their lean, mean B-movie script, but they should've risked that to get us really caring about these characters and their relationship.
There are two big villains the movie builds up, either by having them specifically having killed Statham's pregnant wife or by having a lot of characters talk about how there's only one guy who can kill Statham and this is the guy. In both cases, instead of a showdown, there's more of a subversion. Again, get what they're going for, kinda an Indiana Jones shooting the scimitar guy thing, but what makes something like that work is that it happens during, after, or before a larger action scene. It's not like promising the audience a big fight and then telling them a dick joke. It's like "oh, we've given you one big action scene, you're stuffed, you don't want another, so we're going to give you a joke instead, so it's an action scene and a joke."
Like in Spider-Man 2. First, they had the really big Spider-Man/Doc Ock train fight. Then they spent a couple minutes on talking. Then it was time for another fight, only instead of another big, drawn-out fight, they changed things up and gave the audience a short, sweet fight and then a dramatic confrontation between Peter and Octavius. It worked pretty well. Less is more, but less is still something. You can't say 'nothing is more'.
I did like that Jason Statham's character isn't just an ex-cage-fighter, but also a cop who played by his own rules and a vigilante who took the law into his own hands. A lot of these B-movie clichés are so stale that they should pull a Glee and do mash-ups instead of just straight covers. Like in Lockout. That would've been a much better movie if, instead of Guy Pearce just being "the best agent we've got… but he's a loose cannon," he'd also made a vow to lose his virginity before he graduated high school. And he's dressing up like a woman to get custody of his kids!
One funny thing: two of the villains in the movie (there are about seven) are gay. Like, for each other. And it's just a thing. The movie doesn't play it as being creepy. No one says "After I beat you, Jason Statham, I'm gonna track down your brother and give him a blowjob!" or anything. They're just two guys in love who happen to be corrupt public officials. I think they would've been treated the same way if one of them were a woman. Jason Statham seems pretty accepting too, possibly because he played a bicurious man in the Transporter movies. He does call them "boyfriends" in a somewhat insensitive way, but one of them called his dead wife a cow. Those gay villains, so catty.
Frankly, I like Statham being the new Charles Bronson. Sure, sometimes it's nice when a serious actor decides to play a badass, but other times, you see Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be a tough-as-nails military commando and it's just… c'mon, dude, we all know you weren't training to kill Ruskies when you were eighteen. You were telling Rose your heart would go on.
So having a badass actor who moonlights as a dramatic actor instead of the other way around… that's good. We could do with a few more. I think Gina Carono should be the female version of Jason Statham (the female version of this dramatic actor/badass actor being the "hot actress/badass actress" divide. I think Carono nicely straddles that line, and then puts a wrestling hold on it and chokes it out).
This, Statham's latest, tries to switch things up. I don't know if this is how Statham picks scripts, but a lot of his films seem to do that. The Mechanic had a surprisingly effective relationship going between Statham and Ben Foster. Killer Elite had the interesting concept that Statham couldn't just assassinate his targets, he had to make it look like accidents, until the very end when he decided he could just kill a guy and say "yeah, he got mugged or something, whatever." And the Crank movies are, well, Crank movies.
This time, the movie's a bit more self-aware than usual. It knows it's a B-movie, so it goes over-the-top in places, and it skips around the exposition to get to the point instead of drawing things out. I don't think they even cast someone as Statham's dead wife. They just have him call her on the phone saying "Honey, someone's going to kill you!", then later he looks off-screen and goes "Someone killed you!"
So what we end up with is a typical three-star Statham movie that's trying to be a four-star Statham movie, but it's a little too clever for its own good. It overthinks stuff, and that makes it dip toward two-star range. For instance, the movie ignores Chekov's well-known Law: If the Russian Mob kills the hero's wife in the first act, the hero must kill the Russian Mob in the third act. Instead, Statham lets the main Russian guy get away to stop the cycle of violence so he and the little girl can live in peace. I get what they're going for, showing that protecting the girl is more important than vengeance, but Statham never seems that interested in vengeance. They say out loud that he could've gotten his revenge at any point, he just didn't. So it seems more like Statham didn't really care about his pregnant wife who the bad guy killed and then bragged about killing.
Also, the bad guy sets it up so anyone Statham gets close to will get killed by the Russian Mob, which you'd think is the kind of thing that would immediately put Statham in roaring rampage of revenge mode, just to stop people from getting killed. Look, turn the other cheek is great and all, but that would apply more to someone killing Statham's wife in a car accident or something. This is more like Statham forgiving a serial killer. At the end, Statham even gives the criminals their money back instead of stealing it to donate to charity or something, so it seems like all this craziness really accomplished was inconveniencing the bad guys some.
Another thing is that for a movie that's trying to be four-stars, they half-ass it on the movie's central relationship. See, Statham is getting ready to commit suicide when he sees the little girl getting hassled, which moves him to intervene, save her life, beat up her pursuers, and in general star in an action movie. He takes her to a hotel room, they have one scene together which is mostly her giving him exposition, then the bad guys attack and capture him, so the rest of the movie is Statham trying to get her back.
See, that feels half-assed to me. I was expecting something more like Terminator 2, where there're a lot of scenes between the Terminator and John Connor, building the relationship and exploring that stuff. But they spend most of the movie apart, so it comes off a little presumptuous when Statham talks about how this girl saved his life and gave him a reason to live and stuff. Like, you knew her for five minutes. Don't make up your mind so fast. She might suck. You never know.
It almost becomes Nabokov-y, the way he assumes they have this deep, spiritual bond. Luckily, it turns out that her life sucks too and her parents are dead and she really does need a full-time guardian. But can you imagine if she was just a happy little schoolgirl who was nabbed off the street? He'd beat up the bad guys, she'd thank him, then she'd go back to her parents. Would he still be reading this big connection into her?
I know they were probably worried about having an annoying kid character gumming up their lean, mean B-movie script, but they should've risked that to get us really caring about these characters and their relationship.
There are two big villains the movie builds up, either by having them specifically having killed Statham's pregnant wife or by having a lot of characters talk about how there's only one guy who can kill Statham and this is the guy. In both cases, instead of a showdown, there's more of a subversion. Again, get what they're going for, kinda an Indiana Jones shooting the scimitar guy thing, but what makes something like that work is that it happens during, after, or before a larger action scene. It's not like promising the audience a big fight and then telling them a dick joke. It's like "oh, we've given you one big action scene, you're stuffed, you don't want another, so we're going to give you a joke instead, so it's an action scene and a joke."
Like in Spider-Man 2. First, they had the really big Spider-Man/Doc Ock train fight. Then they spent a couple minutes on talking. Then it was time for another fight, only instead of another big, drawn-out fight, they changed things up and gave the audience a short, sweet fight and then a dramatic confrontation between Peter and Octavius. It worked pretty well. Less is more, but less is still something. You can't say 'nothing is more'.
I did like that Jason Statham's character isn't just an ex-cage-fighter, but also a cop who played by his own rules and a vigilante who took the law into his own hands. A lot of these B-movie clichés are so stale that they should pull a Glee and do mash-ups instead of just straight covers. Like in Lockout. That would've been a much better movie if, instead of Guy Pearce just being "the best agent we've got… but he's a loose cannon," he'd also made a vow to lose his virginity before he graduated high school. And he's dressing up like a woman to get custody of his kids!
One funny thing: two of the villains in the movie (there are about seven) are gay. Like, for each other. And it's just a thing. The movie doesn't play it as being creepy. No one says "After I beat you, Jason Statham, I'm gonna track down your brother and give him a blowjob!" or anything. They're just two guys in love who happen to be corrupt public officials. I think they would've been treated the same way if one of them were a woman. Jason Statham seems pretty accepting too, possibly because he played a bicurious man in the Transporter movies. He does call them "boyfriends" in a somewhat insensitive way, but one of them called his dead wife a cow. Those gay villains, so catty.
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Date: 2012-05-13 05:06 pm (UTC)I am suddenly realizing how many wrestling terms can easily be used as double entendres.
>It almost becomes Nabokov=y
I'm not sure if the image of Jason as Humbert is terrifying or hilarious.
> And he's dressing up like a woman to get custody of his kids!
And Luc Besson would've done it too. He's French.