It’s been a rubbish summer at the multiplex, and with the best will in the world, we can’t necessarily see it being rescued this weekend with the debut of “Mechanic: Resurrection.” It’s a needless sequel to Simon West‘s unacclaimed 2011 title “The Mechanic,” which is itself an unsought remake of the unremembered 1972 Michael Winner film of the same name that stars Charles Bronson. This time, German director Dennis Gansel is on helming duties while Jessica Alba, Tommy Lee Jones and Maggie Cheung also feature, along with a poster that should have the “Mission: Impossible” people phoning their lawyers. But all of that is really just garnish to the main dish: Jason Statham returns to the lead role. He plays a hitman whose specialty is making sure suspicion for his assassinations falls elsewhere, so you can certainly see it’s unlikely to be a huge stretch for the actor, and even it were, he’s certainly limber enough to attempt it. “Jason Statham in a Jason Statham movie” is such a known quantity that it may not be that much of an incentive to vast swathes of filmgoers, but it’s more than enough to satisfy his dedicated fanbase.
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Perhaps it’s surprising (or maybe not after my recent confessions regarding The Rock), but I’m a card-carrying member of his fanbase. I love Jason Statham. Admittedly not quite as much as I love Dwayne Johnson, but more than anyone who wants their proposed monograph on Max Ophüls to be taken seriously should probably admit.
Maybe it’s his intense aura of physical competence, as though every gesture, no matter how small, contains the sense memory of a thousand snapped ulnae, a hundred smashed noses, a dozen chipped teeth. In every step, no matter how sluggish, is the potential for a sprint or a flying kick, and in every stoic silence lingers an impression of a raspy threat. Statham is as ripped and musclebound as the best of them, but he also seems perfectly contained and unusually proportionate, moving with bullish purpose that somehow coexists with a diver’s grace (he very nearly made the British Olympic diving team on three separate occasions).
And we’ve all had occasion to observe his impressive physique, because he is famously ready to show it off. Shirtlessness has become an emblem of Statham’s, and the way he uses it as a weapon —often literally, with the removed garment becoming a noose or a whip or a rope to tangle up those opponents not instantly stunned into pectoral awe— in his actor’s arsenal is endearingly unembarrassed. His trademark action is probably some semi-superhuman physical maneuver on, in or near a motorized vehicle that fells his enemies and necessitates him losing his shirt. In fact, it’s probably this scene below from “The Transporter,” or the following one from the divisive “Transporter 3,” which many Statham observers hate for the way it jumps the shark of jokiness and essentially becomes another “Crank” movie and which I kind of loved for the same reason.
These scenes are so obviously homoerotic (the one below is basically a striptease) that it’s also impossible to believe that it’s unintentional or unnoticed. And if they’re not enough to convince you, check out moments like the scene where Jason Clarke one-on-one showers down a naked, shivering Statham in “Death Race,” or basically the whole of “Blitz,” in which he plays a cop whose homophobia is challenged by being teamed with a gay partner and flirted with by a male serial killer. And that’s one aspect of his appeal that really does set him apart from the action stars of the previous generation: as much as he is always a man’s-man and is almost always avenging the murder of yet another wife or girlfriend (who may or may not get the dignity of a line of dialogue while alive), there is something gently progressive in how much Statham embraces the idea of himself as an object to be looked at. Unlike Dwayne Johnson, for example, there’s an unreconstructed sexiness to Statham that is not family-friendly or PG. But neither is it exclusively, insistently heterosexual —he seems happy to gratify a queer gaze as much as he gratifies a female gaze, and I can say he does the latter quite a lot. Statham is there to be ogled and he doesn’t seem much to mind by whom.
To be sure, that’s mostly what his films are there for —to showcase Statham as a physical, rather than a psychological or emotional, presence. It’s why his trademark inexpressiveness (and he’s bald, so we can’t even draw any conclusions from the the state of his hair) usually suits his characters. His head is not there to be the subject of emotive close-ups, but to be a shining globe hanging decoratively between the swinging lanterns of his sinewed arms, his granite mien only really useful for telling which way he is facing when his impossibly rotating hips and limber mid-air acrobatics betray no other clue.
Yet at the same time, he’s more than the human head-butt that is his Guy Ritchie co-star Vinnie Jones. It’s true that Statham always plays violent, but he’s never quite doltishly thick enough to be a mere thug. There is an elegance to how he bounces heads off anvils or tangles torsos up in chains, a kind of physical intelligence and spatial awareness that makes him seem a different type of smart. That, coupled with his martial arts training, makes the violence he engages in seem athletic, even balletic at times. It gives even his lamest and most formulaic films moments that are, on a simple, visceral level, often transcendently good to look at, sometimes even when he has his shirt on. So to celebrate the best of bald, beefcakey British brawn, here are Jason Statham’s seven best performances.