Not totally true. I have likely seen at least a dozen Statham movies and I like him as a screen presence. But fully half of those would be collaborations with Guy Ritchie or Fast and Furious movies. The movies where he is the lone wolf traditional action hero, I traditionally give a miss.
A Working Man was an exception, and I'll tell you why:
1) It's available for free on Amazon Prime.
2) Amazon Prime is spruiking it heavily so there's no way I can miss that it's on Amazon Prime.
3) It counts toward the current year.
4) Not only does it count toward the current year, but it's come along early enough that it feels like a good get, to have access to it at a time of the year when current year movies usually either have to be rented for a steeper price tag or are the typical Netflix swill. This one actually played in theaters. Later in the year, there would nothing novel about it and I definitely would not prioritize it.
So no, I don't usually see Statham movies, and it felt mildly disorienting to be sitting down to one. Pretty quickly I realized that prejudging them in the past has probably not been a short-sighted perspective on my part. I thought this was pretty bad. David Ayer, a director of action movies who momentarily flirted with prestige in the 2010s, is pretty much a hack.
But I'm not here today to analyze the finer points of David Ayer's career or this particular movie. Really, I want to see how many of these cookie cutter Jason Statham movies I have not seen.
In looking at this, I will skip movies that are what I would have once thought of as "straight to video" -- in other words, movies I never heard of. This needs to be a list of movies that I knew about but chose not to watch.
First, the Statham movies I had seen prior to A Working Man, in order:
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Snatch
The One
Collateral
Cellular
London
Revolver
Crank
The Bank Job
Crank High Voltage
The Expendables
Gomeo & Juliet
Parker
Fast & Furious 6
Spy
Furious 7
The Fate of the Furious
The Meg
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes and Shaw
F9: The Fast Saga (I don't think that's how I used to write this title)
Okay so when I said more than a dozen, I meant 20. A Working Man makes 21.
But I bet the list of those I've heard of but haven't seen is even longer. Let's see:
Mean Machine
The Transporter
The Italian Job (and yes, I had to check my records that it was The Bank Job, and not The Italian Job, that I'd seen)
Transporter 2
The Pink Panther
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
War
Death Race
Transporter 3
The Mechanic
The Expendables 2
Homefront
Mechanic: Resurrection
Wrath of Man
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
Meg 2: The Trench
The Expendables 4
The Beekeeper
That's 18. Just a few less.
"Big deal, Vance," you say. "You saw some of the guy's movies and not others."
I think the point I'm trying to make is that for an actor of Statham's prominence, who is as bankable a star as he is, a person like me, who sees so much, should have seen more than 54% of his movies I was aware of. I don't usually punish actors for appearing in what seems to me like it will be inferior material. Heck, sometimes I want to see inferior material just to help fill out the lower end of my rankings or my Flickchart.
I suppose it's not Statham per se, as much as it is his absolute fealty to making a certain type of movie, that's caused me to skip so many of his movies. When thinking about other actors about whom the same post might be written, the names that came immediately to mind were people like Gerard Butler and Liam Neeson. This exercise would work particularly well for Neeson. It could even work for a guy like Nicolas Cage, given how much of his career he's devoted to paying the bills via schlock, or especially for someone like poor Bruce Willis.
Statham might actually be better off than any of those mentioned in the previous paragraph. A big chunk of my Statham misses were due to being out on two of his series -- Transporter and The Mechanic -- such that not seeing the first also means I have not seen the sequels. And I bailed after the first Expendables so I also didn't see the two others he was in.
Now that I've written almost all this post, I have another observation about myself as a blogger: After a total quantity of posts closing in on 3,500, I'm bound to repeat myself.
I just went to add the "jason statham" tag to this post, and found it already existed. So naturally I wanted to see when I tagged him previously and what I wrote about him. And found this.
If you don't want to follow that link, I'll tell you what you'd find if you did: basically a shorter version of this very post, timed to the release of Parker, when I talked about Statham movies basically going in one of my ears and out the other.
I won't scrap this post, like I did when I recently started to write a second post talking about the surprising feminism of Starship Troopers, a topic I'd already covered. There may be some nuanced differences to the way I'm writing about Statham now from how I wrote about him a dozen years ago. A third post in another dozen years, though, can be avoided I think.
And I have little doubt that Statham will still be making, and still be capable of making, movies like A Working Man in another 12 years, when he's 69 instead of 57. (I guessed he was 58, so not far off.)
And because I like this guy's screen persona, I did hope the Statham exception I'm writing about today would be that A Working Man would actually be good. Alas, it was not, and for that I blame David Ayer rather than his star.
