What’s your favorite Jason Statham movie: the one where he sneaks into a building looking for revenge by beating up every terrorist he comes across on the way, or the one where he slips onto a ship looking for revenge by shooting every henchman he comes across on the way? Statham, like Chuck Norris or Jean-Claude Van Damme back in the day, has a genre all his own: you know exactly what you’re going to get in a movie that has his face blown up huge on the poster with a look that says he’s not in the mood for nonsense. The kind of face you never want to find crouching on your street corner in case you catch an unexpected slap round the head. And yet, there’s something about him that makes us watching him dish it out left and right.
Jason Statham as Jason Statham
We’ve seen Statham handing out beatings in A Working Man, Mutiny, The Beekeeper, Wrath of Man, the Fast & Furious saga and, of course, the two Meg installments, among many other movies. He’s synonymous, at the end of the day, with pure and simple fun, even if they aren’t very good films cinematically… except at the start of his career. And the thing is, back in 1998, Statham didn’t think he’d end up acting: he’d been a professional athlete, a model, and even a shopkeeper in his father’s store before crossing paths with Guy Ritchie, who was at the top of his game.
Though by now we can already spot Ritchie’s tics in his latest works (Fountain of Youth, Aladdin, In the Grey, and so on), back then he was an absolute sensation. His fast, direct way of telling stories on film led him to make films like Sherlock Holmes, The Gentlemen or The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but none of this would’ve happened without his first two marvels: Lock & Stock and Snatch. If you ask me, he hasn’t made anything better, and neither has Statham: they’re rough, fun, they move at a breakneck pace, they’re hilarious, and they even still feel modern today. An absolute delight, really.
If you don’t know them, you really are missing something. Lock & Stock cost barely 800,000 pounds, and in the cast only Statham and Vinnie Jones went on to have careers. If you put it on, for almost two hours you’re going to enjoy a group of small-time crooks who screw up in spectacular fashion and end up owing money to a mafia boss. From here on, everything gets murkier and murkier, until everything falls apart. It was such a success that they even ended up making a series out of it (although, like any good spin-off, it wasn’t quite as good), and now it stands as a relic from another era that you should go back to.
In Snatch, Ritchie raised the bar and cast Brad Pitt in a lead role who made a real effort to ensure nobody could understand a word he says. Benicio del Toro, Vinnie Jones, Stephen Graham and, of course, Statham himself are in it too. It’s brutal, wildly funny, dark, fast, and back then it was a surprise hit: it cost 10 million and grossed more than 80, turning everyone into stars. And yes, it got a TV series too. And sure enough, without the original cast it only lasted two seasons. After that, Statham went off to work in Hollywood, to this day. But if you’re seriously thinking about putting on yet another shoot-’em-up with him as the lead, take this advice: go back, to the time when he could pass for a gangster. You’ll rarely see anything more fun. Word. Or as Brad Pitt would say in Snatch, “Waaahrd.”
