not you jason, not you

Now I know the point of this blog is to run attractive women down and knock movies everyone knows is good just to be an asshole. But I am reviewing a new movie as a favor to you to treat this movie like a jacket made of cobras and stay away.

When you agree to see a movie with Jason Statham you're kind of surrendering your right to complain about the story and the acting but that's not where I'm going.


But while I'm here.

I've always kind of thought hitman movies were stupid. How am I supposed to like a character who murders people for money? He's a fucking parasite on humanity and I'm supposed to be sad when he's sad? Its a harder road block to get by then the fact that all the girls in The Craft were supposed to be high school seniors are all in their mid to late 30s.

Also where the fuck is Neve Campbell now? And did she ever have the nickname soup?

So you meet a hitman, with literally no past. You don't know where he came from, why he has an English accent in an unnamed southern state with jazz clubs. A hitman who kills someone you have no idea if they did anything wrong in the first place OTHER than he wronged a guy with enough money and connections to be killed. So people use the term "character you don't care about" a lot but in this case it really does matter. For my next run on sentence that goes nowhere I'd like to bring up the xmen, thank you in advance for your patience. Jason, Jason has a CIA contact and a liaison between him and the contact. The Liaison is Donald Sutherland who at this point is right next to De Niro and Michael Cain as actors who used to be great who will now jerk a horse off on film for the paycheck. Liaison has a past with Statham, non any writer is willing to let you in on, apparently the cohesion of this movie is a private party between the writers and editors. So the one relationship they establish is between Statham and Sutherland, and let me tell you when they are on screen together its like seeing Brando and Pacino together, the force of the moment is captivating. Its really thrilling to see these two be supposed life long friends and yet have the mannerisms and conversation pace like they met each other 8 minutes before the filming.

So CIA contact calls Statham and tells him his life long friend(maybe who knows) is on the take and is jeopardizing missions or whatever and after Statham puts up a vehement and directed 40 second argument defending what is supposed to be his best friend's life he reluctantly agrees to kill him.

So heres how the x-men fits in. Imagine you meet Cyclops, and in the first 8 boxes Cyclops kills someone for money. Then you find out that Cyclops' mentor is Professor X. Enter Magneto, Magneto tells Cyclops, hey your best friend and mentor Charles is a dick and taking money, so you have to kill him, so Cyclops kills him. Cyclops blasts Professor X into being dead and now you are left in a story where you're supposed to like Cyclops. And the analogy is perfect because like Professor X in this movie Donald Liaison Sutherland is in a fucking wheelchair and Statham shoots him in the chest and fucking leaves him in a garage to fucking rot.

So thats all the set up. Statham kills his mentor in the opening of the movie because he was offered money to do it by a guy he has virtually no relationship to and that is your hero of this movie, a murderer of a handicapped man for money.

Enter Ben Foster. Ben plays Sutherlands misbegotten bastardized ne'erdowell of a kid. BF asks Statham to take him under his wing much like his father did. So after a convincing 20 seconds of rejection Statham agrees to do so and training begins. They murder people and who gives a shit about it.

A startlingly hilarious turn of events however is when Statham has Foster murder another hitman who just so happens to live in the same town as Statham. What are the odds? So anyways in no shock CIA/Magneto turns out to be not a credible success and Statham realizes that he killed Sutherland for no reason and Sutherland was a square guy all along. What is upsetting however is he figures it out when he sees a hitman he believes to be dead due to Sutherland's misdoings alive...at the bus station... in the same town that Statham lives in. Again what are the odds? What are the odds 3 international high profile professional fucking killers all live in the same fucking town. Its kind of insulting to write this out so simply.

To sum up the story Foster eventually learns that Statham killed his father and in a nice revenge subplot to the movie after Statham gets revenge on the CIA contact Foster.......is murdered after trying to exact revenge for his father's death. You think the movie is going to be satisfying in any way and it ends like it was a real movie. It has a No Country for Old Men ending in a fucking Jason Statham fuckpile of a movie. The whole movie goes nowhere and in the process doesn't include any sort of jumping roundhouse kicks.

you expect this

and get this

The reason I am doing this is because when you see a Statham movie you throw expectations of a good cohesive easy to follow story with character depth and wither a moral/statement or a movie that challenges you as a viewer. And in exchange for your sense of worth you get..............cool things. Ax fights, car chases, guys being killed by ladders, dudes kicking fire hoses into peoples faces. TITS! And so on. Other than tits none of that happened. I accidentally saw a really bad Nicolas Cage/Casper Van Dien movie(and thats the level cage is at now) thinking I was going to see a Jason Statham movie. The mechanic is a deal breaker with Statham. We worked something out and now he's thrown a wrench into the gears. This movie threw out the story which is to be expected. But then it did something I didn't see coming. It decided to not be exciting either. Which to me is the shocker.

So you watch a movie with no real gun fights or standoffs no characters you care about. And that's just not something people say. You literally learn nothing about Statham in this movie. He has no past you don't know where he came from or his family or training....anything. Its actually pretty amazing. You learn more about the kid who shot Omar than you do Statham. You learn more about the aliens in War of the Worlds. You learn more about Zed in Pulp Fiction.

So there it is. A stranger you don't know or care about kills a man in a wheelchair, later cons his son into killing some people including a man who's family you meet and then kills the son. Fuck your feelings. I started like 5 paragraphs with "so"