Jason Statham is, like the title of his new movie says, a working man. The ex-diver, ex-model, ex-street-seller from Shirebrook, England, has been in the movies for coming up on 30 years, approaching 50 films; in the rare year that he doesn’t have one out, he’ll make it up the next year with two, or four. At that rate, it can be difficult for the casual observer to discern the difference between a high-quality Statham vehicle, a low-rent Statham vehicle, or a high-quality-but-still-low-rent Statham vehicle—not to mention the various franchise movies that benefit from his participation and/or waste his time. He’s not one of those stars where you can just say, look for the ones he did with great directors, or check off the ones that figured into year-end awards. Those aren’t the kinds of movies Statham makes. He makes movies where a glowering bald guy takes out a bunch of henchmen, or where a bunch of blokes conspire to steal something from another bunch of blokes. He’s one of those stars whose career can have you staring at two different David Ayer movies he made in successive years, wondering why one of them is quite good and the other is kind of bad. Not to worry, lads! There are some telltale signs as to whether the Statham movie you’re thinking about watching (or are in the middle of watching) is one of the good ones. Not all of these need to be true in order to make a good Jason Statham movie, and not all of these can single-handedly save one, either. But the more of these that the movie adheres to, the better it’s likely to be. Here’s what makes a good Statham picture:
He’s allowed to be English.
Unlike his tonier countrymen, Statham has rarely been forced into a fake American accent, even as he makes an increasing number of American movies. Sometimes they politely ignore his U.K. origins; sometimes they try to dress him up in an All-American Skulking Cap (one of those baseball caps mysteriously absent of any logos or emblems) and stick him in a pick-up truck or whatever, like he’s a Jack Reacher who lost his bus pass. That’s fine, I guess. But it just hits better when his Englishness is at least briefly acknowledged. Even a movie as silly and dumb as A Working Man makes repeated references to his career in the character’s time in the Royal Marines. For all I knew, they could have been making up the Royal Marines, but it sounds like something a Jason Statham character would be in.
He’s being directed by Guy Ritchie.
Statham’s first, best, and most frequent director cast him in the gangster comedies Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, two sort of Tarantino-on-the-dole productions that set the template for Statham’s persona as well as everyone’s idea of a Guy Ritchie Movie, even as the latter has shifted a bit over the years. (Now his vibe is more of a posher Antoine Fuqua, innit?) As it happens, Statham also features in two of Ritchie’s best recent films, the hard-boiled Wrath of Man and the underrated caper Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (even the title is a delight!). Ritchie has made action movies, and Statham has made action movies, and Ritchie has made movies where Statham beats guys up. But their collaborations don’t necessarily rely purely on fisticuffs, especially in the earlier films; Ritchie understands that Statham is a movie-star vibe even more than a dexterous movie martial artist (though he is also that). He’s essentially responsible for Statham being fit enough to star in real movies, not just the English version of DTV films. Their movies together are so much fun that you can almost forget they made one called Revolver that threatens to disprove this rule entirely.
That is, he’s being directed by Guy Ritchie whilst not sporting long locks of hair.
Revolver really is quite dreadful.
His dialogue isn’t being supplied by Sylvester Stallone.
Granted, the friendship between Sly and Stath is really quite cute. Statham and Jet Li (who have also collaborated on multiple movies) were the newer (which is to say, still middle-aged) guys recruited for Stallone’s attempted all-star old-school action extravaganza The Expendables. Their characters, Barney Ross (Stallone, showing Herculean restraint by not naming himself Barney Rubble, considering another Expendable is called Toll Road) and Lee Christmas (Statham), are besties constantly trading stilted banter throughout four installments. Statham must enjoy their working relationship, because he also starred in Homefront and A Working Man, two different movies penned by, but not starring, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Sylvester Stallone. If you can believe it, Sly isn’t actually the master of terse Englishness that you might otherwise assume. They’ve made some endearing movies together—sometimes the Ross/Christmas banter is so clunky and leaden that it’s funny in spite of itself—but not really any good ones.
He has access to ample props.
A Working Man seems like it’s going to understand this by featuring an early fight scene at a construction yard. Statham wallops a guy with a pail full of screws! He literally sandbags someone! Yes!!! Then the rest of the movie, he’s mostly torturing dudes (also a feature of The Beekeeper) or blowing people away with heavy artillery. This is not the way of Frank Martin, also known as the Transporter in the trilogy known as The Transporter. It’s not as if Frank, who serves as a driver and delivery man for unsavory types, doesn’t pull a gun when needed. But the fight scenes in the Transporter movies often involve him using a coat, or a hose, or whatever’s on hand to fight a bunch of henchmen, often all brandishing little axes. Corey Yuen, fight choreographer and co-director of The Transporter, set such a good example that many subsequent Statham action sequences have failed to live up to it; for example, how does he make it through The Meg without a single scene where he avails himself to the contents of a laboratory or perhaps some manner of beachside crab shack?
He slicks himself up in oil prior to a fight scene.
Again, the Transporter movies are just the best. This is also the only thing that doesn’t happen in the Crank movies, but they still get a pass because they are slicked up in oil in spirit.
He drives a cool car, even/especially if it will be his grave.
Fast & Furious movies haven’t stopped with their ridiculous casting coups—remember how Brie Larson showed up in Fast X to become the third Best Actress Oscar winner to act opposite Vin Diesel in this series?!—but they may never top the dream casting of surprise-dropping Jason Statham into the credits of Fast & Furious 6 and making him the villain for Furious 7, because he arguably fits the cast profile better than most of the actual cast does: B-movie action cred, able to perform ridiculousness with poker-faced sincerity, consummate onscreen driver. This began with those Transporter movies, but it’s not exclusive to them; he’s also a performance driver in the pretty fun 2008 remake of Death Race and the moderately fun 2003 remake of The Italian Job. Still, it’s Transporter 3 where he achieves perfect oneness with his car, when he’s outfitted with a bracelet that will blow him up if he strays too far from the vehicle. Also, late in the movie, the bad guy pronounces with maximum disdain: “His beloved car will be his grave.” No one says that about the truck he lives out of in A Working Man, even though it very much could be!
He’s not a cop.
Statham has never made a good cop picture, and it’s not that he hasn’t tried. He’s made movies with titles like Blitz and Chaos, and he always plays a law-enforcer with about twenty percent too much hostility, even for movies where the cop-on-the-edge is supposed to be a flawed antihero. (At the same time, it’s not as if these movies ever tip over into critique of the police force.) The man simply cannot convince as someone who abides by other people’s laws. The exception that proves the rule is the fantasy-action movie The One, where he plays an enforcer of the laws of the multiverse, and is therefore more of a Timecop.
Even better, he has a job that seems like a normal or unassuming job, but it turns out, he’s not such a normal [guy with that job] after all.
This is another thing that A Working Man does get right, though Statham the humble construction worker has nothing on Statham the humble barn-dwelling beekeeper in, yes, The Beekeeper, which achieves a ridiculous Zen that may be hard to top in the future. This kind of background could easily improve a movie like Homefront, where he’s simply a retired DEA guy living in seclusion. No! He should also be a plumber, or a line cook, or a tow-truck driver! The Mechanic would be better if he posed as an actual mechanic in between hitman jobs.
He has to keep looking at a clock or switch a briefcase at an airport, things of this nature.
Statham keeps in touch with his ensemble-player roots with his addition to the Fast & Furious series, where he can turn up for a couple of good action sequences and then dip to take on child traffickers and stuff in his solo films. But on the increasingly rare occasion that he gets involved with some kind of heist job – your Bank Jobs, your Italian Jobs, your Ruses de Guerre – he’s usually a wonderful addition, whether ringleading (as in Bank or Operation Fortune) or playing a bloke called “Handsome Rob” (as in Italian). If you ever get a chance to check out Christian Marclay’s 24-hour montage The Clock, it features ample footage of a youngish Statham watching a public clock circa late morning/early afternoon. C’est la cinema! The ticking-clock and/or briefcase-based mission also applies to his opening-scene cameo in Michael Mann’s Collateral, where it is exceedingly easy to assume he is, in fact, playing Frank Martin, the Transporter; and the Crank movies, which (naturally) take things further by having his body functioning as the ticking clock.
He co-stars with a powerful lady.
Statham’s movies are, by their nature, dude-heavy affairs, and that’s fine. But they so often indulge in that Stallone-esque taciturn-warrior-monk vibe that it’s difficult not to notice how much these movies perk up when Statham gets to play opposite a woman who’s not exclusively imperiled. It doesn’t have to be a romance; Statham leading ladies of note have included Aubrey Plaza in Operation Fortune, Jennifer Lopez in Parker, and, alongside his delightfully self-parodic turn, Melissa McCarthy in Spy. I’m not saying we need a Jason Statham rom-com in our future… or am I?! No, I’m not, but I’d rather see his Deckard Shaw spin off with one of those aforementioned Fast & Furious Oscar-winners (or Vanessa Kirby, who plays his sister in Hobbs & Shaw) than stick with Dwayne Johnson’s Hobbs.
He protects a baby.
There are a bunch of movies where Statham protects a child, sometimes belonging to his character and sometimes not. More often than not, it’s a sign that we’re dealing with one of his more boilerplate vehicles; this is where A Working Man (in which he both rescues a young adult and fights for custody of his own child) lands, above the bottom-of-the-barrel crime stuff, but well below his top-tier work. However, the Hard Boiled-esque scene in The Fate of the Furious where he protects Vin Diesel’s infant son during a shoot-out on an airplane single-handedly justifies that movie’s post-Paul Walker existence (at least for the moment). In this way and so many others, Statham is keeping the next generation safe.