In 20 Years He'll Be A Chuck Norris Meme

You know who's awesome?

This dude right here.



Despite being in so many awful movies, I'll still watch a new Jason Statham flick. Any Jason Statham flick.

There's something really compelling about the guy. I don't know if it's that outside of Bruce Willis, we don't have a lot of prematurely balding action stars. Maybe it's the ten-pack-a-day voice*. I think it all boils down to a natural charisma that a lot of your 80's action stars had.

Saying it out loud, yeah... It's like someone hopped in a time machine, ignored the chance to say, kill Hitler or make themselves rich in the stock market, or accidentally become their own grandpa and instead dragged this guy by his thinning hair into the 21st century.




This is all a very long digression of course in order to say that The Bank Job is not a terribly good movie. In fact, for what it has to work with, it's kind of bad. Not the kind of bad that I want to spend a thousand words talking about, but just bad enough to leave me disappointed that a 70's-style heist flick involving secret naked pictures of a crown princess, bent coppers, and a plan to tunnel under a bank went so flat on me.



And the Statham (because in 10 years, it'll be a title, like "the champ" or "the ombudsman") is actually kind of wasted in this. The thing that even the crappiest movies with him do well is make him an engaging hero (or at least protagonist). Here, he's some dude who's not particularly more interesting or smarter than any of the other dudes, digging in a hole for about an hour before things get complicated.

Ostensibly based on a true story, there's an incredibly interesting movie to be made about these events. It's just too bad the one we got was sort of muddled, didn't have particularly interesting or fleshed out villains, and just kind of ends with an "and then everything was okay" text scroll.

Also - and I can't really articulate WHY at this point - the movie wasn't very evocative of the 70's. It was set in the 70's and everyone sort of had bad haircuts and the ladies all wore dresses with blindingly busy prints... but I don't know. There was something too glossy and not appropriately vicious about the thing - like it wasn't willing to go far enough.

I'm a guy who needs my violent movies to go all the way... put out, if you will.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll spend 5 paragraps too many talking about Lena Olin.

Or maybe I'll post another script. Who knows?



*Fun game, kids - try talking like that in your everyday conversation. It's like trying to talk while gargling hot rocks, right?