2:52PM, Sep 17, 2008
Jason Statham is one of the great, unsung successes of British cinema.
Yep, that's right. The bullet-headed, onetime street hustler and Olympic hopeful has sagely played to his strengths in a series of enjoyable outings ranging from Crank to The Bank Job.
He's an action hero who's truly risen without trace...
Forget Jude Law. Don't concern yourself with Liam Neeson. I wouldn't let Clive Owen detain you.
No, the one British actor notching up a practically unbroken sequence of box office successes is none other than Guy Ritchie protege and taciturn hardman Jason Statham.
For Gawd's sake, why? Well, Statham knows his market, content to stay within his comfort zone (if you can call a place where extreme violence is the norm a comfort zone).
As he says himself :"You ain't ever gonna get an Academy Award for doing Crank and you certainly won't for doing all the other movies I've done."
He's also streetwise. No, not in any kind of RADA-educated Nick Moran kind of way. He's a genuine ducker and diver. Not for nothing was his old man a lounge singer who also dabbled in the black market.
Unsurprisingly, Statham also went on to become a practised exponent of what we shall call "street theatre", working scams selling iffy perfume outside Harrods.
However, Statham had plenty else to offer. As a youngster he developed an interest in diving which led to him finishing 12th in the 1992 World Championships (he was also a member of Britain's National Diving Squad).
It was here that the street smart athlete was clocked by a talent spotter and ended up working as a model for the clothing chain French Connection. And it was here that Ritchie - on the look-out for a physical actor who knows what's what - first clapped eyes on him.
(the fledgling director invited him to audition for a part by challenging him to impersonate an illegal street vendor and con him into buying fake jewellery).
It worked. Statham played Bacon in Ritchie's breakthrough 1998 mockney geezer caper Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and stayed on board with Mr Madonna for the follow-up Snatch, alongside Brad Pitt and Benicio Del Toro.
The next few roles - John Carpenter's sci-fi thriller Ghosts of Mars with Ice Cube and the martials arts actioner One with Jet Li - consolidated Statham's reputation without giving him star billing.
That all changed with The Transporter. The Luc Besson-scripted 2002 action thriller starred Statham - blunt, practically wordless, dangerous - as Frank Martin, a "transporter" of dodgy goods.
"American cinema is in desperate need for a new action star. The Transporter provides perhaps the best candidate the movies have had since Vin Diesel's pale XXX," gushed Boxofficemojo.com.
The following year Statham surrendered top billing...but did get to flex his pecs alongside Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Donald Sutherland and Ed Norton as the driver Handsome Rob in the surprisingly decent American remake of the British classic The Italian Job.
The role gave an inkling of Statham's attitude: "I've always had that competitive nature, whether it's racing around the track in Mini Coopers or diving off a platform or doing a bit of grappling. Whatever it is, I've got that sort of competitive edge."
Director Michael Mann was impressed enough to offer Statham a cameo alongside Tom Cruise in Collateral and he went on to play a fiendish gang boss making life difficult for Kim Basinger in the thriller Cellular.
Transporter 2 followed and then Statham made a rare lapse of judgement with the role of Jake Green in Ritchie's practically unintelligible crime mystery Revolver.
A couple of straight-to-video outings - London with Jessica Biel and Chaos with Wesley Snipes - came and went before Statham firmly hit his stride with Crank.
He played Chev Chelios, a professional hitman who wakes up to discover that he's been injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs and has just one hour to find the antidote.
Shot on a $12m budget, Crank took $44m worldwide and was quickly followed by the 2007 martial arts thriller War which saw Statham reteaming with his One co-star Jet Li.
The same year Statham delivered an impressive, unchacteristically thoughtful turn, as car salesman-turned-heistmeister Terry Leather in the old-fashioned British robbery caper The Bank Job.
At the same time US film trade journal Variety was bemoaning the lack of American action heroes - Johnny Depp was "too fey" while Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and Samuel L Jackson were the wrong side of fifty.
"Not atypically, the year's top-grossing film, The Dark Knight, stars Brits Christian Bale and Michael Caine alongside the late Heath Ledger, from Down Under.
"Two of the top rising stars right now are both from the UK - 300 star Gerard Butler and Jason Statham."
As if to prove the point, Statham is now revving up as Jensen "Frankenstein" Ames in Geordie director Paul WS Anderson's "Carmaggedon" hi-octane thriller Death Race.
For an actor who happily concedes his movies are mindless, he's certainly no fool.
As Statham says: I'm certainly not Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt. And if people come up and say they like the movies, it's a great compliment."
Tim Evans
