The Screengrab : the bank job

Transported: The Jason Statham Think Piece

John Constantine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I had traveled half-way across the country to spend some quality time with my father. We were drinking Tomintoul scotch whiskey in his Colorado cabin. It was snowing outside and we were quiet, watching a movie, entranced. I turned to my dad and shared with him the undeniable truth I had gleaned from the film: "Transporting is the greatest job on earth." He sipped his drink, reflected on his years of wisdom, and nodded: "Yes. Yes it is."

If you're unfamiliar with Luc Besson's Transporter series — or wonder why a father and son would spend a portion of their few, precious hours together watching a movie about a guy and his car — its appeal can be summed up in two words: Jason Statham. The titular star doesn't make transporting look easy, of course. Adhering to a strict moral code while transporting goods for less-than-reputable businessmen is taxing. The guy has to make BMWs perform stunts that would confound a physicist. Cars just don't move like that, and if you're carting around a petite young woman in the trunk, as a transporter often does, you've got to factor in her continued survival as a goal. Plus, the job keeps you so busy — maintaining your pristine black suit and kicking the crap out of nameless thugs — that you don't get much of a chance to enjoy your secret seaside villa. (Incidentally, The Transporter has five named thugs in its credit list — Thugs 1 through 3, Little Thug, and Giant Thug — but Statham seems to brutalize quite a few poor, uncredited thugs, as well.) And getting your work finished in a timely manner is complicated by your nagging sense of honor. Human trafficking? Crap, you can't transport when you know that's going down. A wan model, wearing nothing but an unbuttoned nursing uniform and two uzis, kidnaps the rich toddler you're driving to school? Shit, doesn't look like you're punching out early today. And with all that going on, when does Statham find the time to sculpt his guns?

This is what you think about when you experience Jason Statham movies. You ask the big questions. The biggest of which is: why the hell can't I stop watching him?

Take 2006's Crank and its sequel, Crank: High Voltage, which opens this Friday. That a sequel to Crank even exists is a testament to Statham's rising star power: the original Crank ended with Statham's character falling umpteen-hundred feet from a helicopter, landing on a car, then bouncing onto the ground and dying. (Poster tagline for new film: "He was dead, but he got better.")

Crank is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life, a brutishly stupid set-piece pileup that finds Statham getting maimed by an army of racial stereotypes. Statham's character, hit-man Chev Chelios, has been injected with the poisonous "Beijing Cocktail" and therefore needs to maintain a constant stream of adrenaline running through his system or he'll die. The plot, in Statham's own words, is: "Run, run, fucking run. I do not stop." It features a sex scene between Statham's and Amy Smart's characters that's (I think) supposed to be funny: when Chelios feels himself flagging at a bus stop, his only choice is to have street-sex with Smart, on a mailbox in front of a gaggle of picture-taking Japanese tourists. It's about as titillating as a porta-john. I couldn't look at mailboxes for a week, I was that embarrassed for them. But now, when I see trailers for Crank: High Voltage, which actually manages to look stupider in two minutes than Crank does in eighty, I think, "Hmm. Yes. I cannot wait to see it. I needed plans for Friday night and thankfully they have presented themselves. Thank you, Mr. Statham."

Perhaps it helps that Statham appears to feel much like I would, if forced to stimulate sex with Amy Smart in front of a large group of strangers: slightly disgusted, but willing to get the job done. Speaking about a public-sex scene in the Crank sequel (we can only imagine), Statham said, "Trying to do an aggressive sex scene is quite difficult, especially in a public place with a crowd of screaming extras with their little camera phones going click-click, taking pictures of your pasty white ass." Statham is the action-star who isn't afraid to tell it like it is, or insult his own ass cheeks.

But where the hell did this sort of self-denigrating hero come from? The twenty-first century rebirthed the marquee action star, but today's dominant, male-fantasy models are a far cry from their Reagan-era forebears. The big-muscle, low-vocabulary Schwarzeneggers and Stallones have given way to the sad, silent, and speedy Matt Damons and Daniel Craigs, intelligent action peddlers who — off-screen — deplore the violence they peddle. Statham doesn't play in their league, though; he's a C-lister. In some ways, he's closer to the Clinton-era, thick-skulled, martial-artist-as-actor tradition of Seagal and Van Damme, but that lineage doesn't quite fit him either; though Statham's acting has never won an Oscar, and his American accent has been derided, he looks like Orson Welles next to the Muscles from Brussels.

Jason Statham's early life seems as oddball and awesome as some of his roles. The son of a lounge singer and a dancer, he was on Britain's National Diving squad for twelve years, which led work modeling for the French Connection. To bankroll his scuba-diving hobby, he hustled perfume and jewelry on London street corners. This, plus his modeling and his martial-arts training, led him to his acting debut in Guy Ritchie's hipster-faves Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch at the turn of the century. He played one-named roles, guys called Bacon and Turkish, swarthy Cockney con men who spent their onscreen time doing everything to avoid violence, not dole it out. But how did he go from skinny, balding Brit spouting witticisms to becoming the Transporter? And why do I like him so much as the Transporter?

Let's be honest. Statham's never as cool as Craig, but no one can be. No man has that many smooth things to say and, even if they did, no random woman on a beach is going to respond when you say them. He's never as collected as Damon, but Jason Bourne is a government-made super-spy. Chev Chelios doesn't jump off a bridge because it's the strategic maneuver he's been trained to take. He jumps off a bridge because, well, that's about the only choice he has. He's hassled and busy, annoyed by the demands of survival, but will do whatever it takes to survive.

Maybe it's that hint of everyman exasperation that makes Statham so irresistible, that, counterintuitively, makes his most outsized exploits (flipping luxury sedans onto moving trains, etc.) seem plausible. When Statham's interrupted while transporting, or he's given a drug that's going to make his heart explode, he responds with a begrudging sigh. A rolling of the eyes. God, why did it have to be today? I have things to do! That hint of reality establishes that for all his toughness, Jason Statham is One Of Us. If I gave up carbs and worked out eighteen hours a day, he suggests, I, too, could live his golden life. And if I did, I would feel about life the way his characters feel. (There are differences, I suppose. I, for one, would gently caress Ms. Smart in the comfort and safety of the mail truck.)

I was wrong. Transporting isn't the greatest job on earth. Being Jason Statham is.

Year-End Roundup: AFI, Boston Critics…and Stephen King?

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Here’s your Monday afternoon update on the year-end award and Top 10 list derby. The American Film Institute has released its annual top ten list – I’m not sure I knew the AFI had an annual top ten list, but apparently they’ve been doing this since at least 2000 – and most of the titles are familiar from other such lists. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk and Frost/Nixon are among the predictable entries, but superhero enthusiasts will be pleased to see both The Dark Knight and Iron Man represented. The full list is here, along with the AFI’s top ten television shows, which include The Wire, thank you very much.

The Boston Film Critics had an indecisive year in 2008. They awarded ties for both Best Picture (WALL-E and Slumdog Millionaire) and Best Actor (Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler). No big surprises here, aside from maybe the Ensemble Cast award for Tropic Thunder.

The most idiosyncratic Top 10 list to date has to be that of Entertainment Weekly columnist and Screengrab 24-hour marathon inspiration Stephen King. “I'm not trustworthy when it comes to movies… This is almost surely the only 10-best list you'll read that contains not one but two Jason Statham movies.” Indeed, King singles out both The Bank Job and Death Race for praise (he hasn’t caught Transporter 3 yet), along with the craptastic The Ruins. “It could have been ludicrous. Instead, it's unrelenting.” Yes, unrelentingly ludicrous. Anyway, check out his full list here – it’s the scariest thing he’s written in years.

Related:
Roger Ebert Supersizes Top 10 of 2008
Film Threat Unveils Frigid 50 of 2008

DVD Digest for July 15, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a comedic visionary gets the Criterion treatment, Jack goes nuts on Blu-Ray, and the unholy pairing of Martin Lawrence and Donny Osmond hits DVD.

DVD of the Week: Jacques Tati was one of the greatest comic filmmakers ever to man a camera, a brilliant visual filmmaker whose skill at engineering gags was only matched by that of Buster Keaton. Criterion has previously released Tati’s classics M. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Play Time, and now they’ve made available a snazzy new edition of Tati’s final theatrical feature Trafic. In Trafic- also the final onscreen appearance of Tati’s signature character Monsieur Hulot- Tati takes on car culture, as Hulot takes to the highways in a souped-up camper and encounters all sort of automotive mishaps and outrageous technology. Compared to the almost impossibly ambitious Play Time, Trafic’s humor is quirkier, but Tati’s sense of timing and gentle humanism are as present as they ever were. The DVD also includes the two-hour documentary In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot from 1989, as well as a number of interviews with the filmmaker and a new essay from critic Jonathan Romney. Trafic may not be as well-known as many of Tati’s beloved classics, but it’s nonetheless an important title in his filmography, definitely worthy of the attention Criterion has lavished on it for this release.

This week’s recent releases on DVD include: College Road Trip (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the aforementioned Lawrence/Osmond vehicle; Jason Statham in the true-crime inspired The Bank Job (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Step Up 2 the Streets (Disney, also Blu-Ray), a sequel no one actually asked for; Aaron Eckhart in Meet Bill (First Look); the Christina Ricci-starring fractured fairy tale Penelope (Summit Entertainment); and the Brazilian Oscar submission The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (WEA). In addition, this week brings a trio of horror releases- Asylum (MGM), Shutter (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and the omnibus film Trapped Ashes (Lionsgate), whose participants included Ken Russell, Monte Hellman, and Joe Dante.

TV-on-DVD releases this week include Birds of Prey: The Complete Series (Warner) and Saving Grace: Season 1 (Fox).

Finally, the week’s sole Blu-Ray only release is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Warner).

Take Five: True Crime

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Getting wide release this weekend is Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, also known as the movie that seems like it should be directed by Guy Ritchie but isn't. It is, however, based on an infamous 1971 vault heist which has gained recent noteriety not so much for the unsolved crime — although it was one of the biggest bank jobs in British history at the time — but the circumstances of its aftermath: what seemed to be an incredibly newsworthy story was hardly written about in the days following thanks to a "D notice" that served to gag the press. Speculation as to why this would be the case has raged for thirty-five years, and now, Donaldson's film (informed by a newly popular conspiracy theory involving a royal sex scandal) attempts to answer the question definitively, if fictionally. Nothing makes for an exciting movie like crime, and nothing makes a crime movie have that little extra edge than the slightest elements of truth. True crime movies have been a fixture of the silver screen almost since their inception; there's so many to choose from that we don't even begin to pretend this list is definitive. It's just a few of our favorites, each for a different reason. Line them all up on a cold night, watch them in a row, and thank your lucky stars this never happened to you...

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

A little-seen and underrated noir thriller from the genre's waning days, Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story eschews the highly stylized approach of many of its contemporaries and goes for an understated, gritty style that allows it to function almost like a documentary. The story is built around the then-infamous case of Phenix City, Alabama, which at the time was so thoroughly controlled by mobsters (who became fat from prostitution and gambling fed by nearby military bases) that they operated with near-complete impunity. When Alabama's attorney general was assassinated there, it became the first city since the Civil War to have martial law declared without the occurence of a natural disaster. Raw, exciting, and remarkably violent for its time, The Phenix City Story is a forgotten classic of its time.

BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

Sometimes, what makes a true crime masterpiece so powerful isn't its proximity to the truth, but its distance from it. Arthur Penn's brilliant crime drama, which made a handful of careers and set the tone for the highly personal studio filmmaking of the 1970s, was based on the real story of outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, but only insofar as it gave him pegs on which to hang his story. In real life, Bonnie and Clyde were considerably less attractive than Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and even more morally unappealing; they were, in fact, vicious and contemptible heels, little more than brutal murderers, whose legend grew out of a nation obsessed with pulp fiction and crime as escapism. It's a testament to the magic of storytelling that they came to the big screen so completely altered.

THE KRAYS (1990)

For nearly a decade during London's Swinging Sixties, the undisputed overlords of the organized crime underworld were the brothers Ronald and Reginald Kray. Before their own penchant for bloody mayhem brought them down, they were the most feared individuals in the criminial demimonde, ruling their empire through torture and intimidation. Peter Medak's colorful, engaging biopic about the brothers is bouyed by its enjoyable evocation of London in the '60s as well as a remarkable performance as the twins by real-life brothers Gary and Martin Kemp — like the Krays, fraternal twins, but unlike them, best known to the world as the leaders of the 1980s New Romantic pop band Spandau Ballet! It's the first major role for both Kemps, and they tackle it with such gusto and skill it's surprising they never became major stars, though both stuck with the acting game.

DAHMER (2002)

Serial killers are a staple food of horror and thriller directors, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a spate of low-budget psychological chillers all based on the real-life exploits of actual mass murderers. Most of them were little more than slightly pretentious splatter flicks, but Dahmer — written and directed by David Jacobson — stood out as the class of the bunch. Resting on a smart script, a genuinely stark and chilling mood, and a fantastic lead performance by Jeremy Renner as the infamous Milwaukee cannibal, Dahmer is a compulsively watchable and truly terrifying movie. Its power comes not from gore or mayhem, but from the simplicity of its vision and the way in which it involves us emotionally with Dahmer while all the time creeping us ever closer to a full revelation of the depths of his madness.

CRAZY LOVE (2007)

One of the most bizarre true-crime documentaries ever made, this astonishing film from last year relies for its watchability on the fact that it's a story so unbelievable, it could only be true. It traces the improbable relationship of influential New York attorney Burt Pugach, who carried on an affair with a lovely young woman named Linda Riss. In 1959, Riss broke off the affair with the married Pugach, after which, enraged and terrified that she would start seeing someone else, he hired thugs to throw lye in her face, blinding and permanently scarring her. This hideous act would be the end of many true-crime movies, but here, it's only the beginning: sentenced to fourteen years in prison, Pugach went on to write Riss constantly while he served his time — and eventually, when he was released, the two were married!

Screengrab Review: The Bank Job

John Constantine — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:17:00 GMT

The Bank Job says it's based on a true story, proudly proclaiming on its striking retro posters, "The true story of a heist gone wrong. . . in all the right ways." Unlike some movies that make similar claims, like the upcoming 21, The Bank Job doesn’t take too many gross liberties with its foundational truths, such as they are. This much is fact: in 1971, Lloyds Bank on London’s Baker Street was robbed. During the burglary, the criminals’ walkie-talkie communications were overheard by a ham-radio enthusiast. It was the biggest story in town for about a week, until a government-issued D-notice, or gag order, was put in effect and that was the end of it. (The U.K. government denies a D-notice was ever issued.) The bad guys got away with it, and no one ever found out why. Bank Job writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, along with director Roger Donaldson, take these events and spin them into a decent story about amateur crooks, thuggish pornographers, pervy politicians and evil Black Panthers.

Clement and La Franais’ version of events revolve around Terry, played by Jason Statham in patented tough-guy mode, and his gang being unwittingly hired by MI5 to retrieve pornographic photos of a British royal stored in black activist/extortionist pimp Michael X’s safe-deposit box. Statham’s become a regular face in the trashy action genre, but The Bank Job finds him returning to his Guy Ritchie roots as a small-time player in London’s seamy underworld. Statham and his crew make up the best parts of the film, their canned heist-movie dialogue ("The one score that will change everything") delivered with enough charm to keep the tedium of cliché at bay. The rest of the players don’t pull their weight. Peter De Jersey’s Michael X isn’t very threatening, David Suchet’s Lew Vogel comes off as less imposing and more ready for an episode of PBS’ Mystery, and the film’s numerous cops and G-men are just set dressing. Taken as a whole, The Bank Job is decent fluff. The only real knock against it is Roger Donaldson’s failure to pursue the '70s-exploitation trappings so prevalent in the movie’s marketing and first half. It’s more Joe Carnahan than it is Peter Collinson. When the movie focuses on the titular job, it’s great stuff, satisfyingly seedy and exciting. Everything else goes a little wrong and, no, not in all the right ways.

Cracking the Heist Movie

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

With The Bank Job due in theaters on Friday, Terrence Rafferty takes a look back at the long film history of "small groups of very intense people stealing stuff from banks, art museums, racetracks, casinos, high-end jewelers, armored cars and railroad trains." His piece in the New York Times dissects the heist movie and its enduring popularity.

There are two words that appear in the plot descriptions of most successful heist pictures: "gone awry." As Rafferty explains, that's a big part of the fun. "Although the planning of the crime — the recruiting of the team, the diagrams of security systems, the blueprints, the maps of getaway routes — usually takes up a fair amount of screen time and is often terrifically entertaining, nobody in the audience really wants to see the job go exactly as the thieves have doped it out. That would be kind of redundant, and worse, it would feel uncomfortably impersonal. Heist pictures are all about process, technique, mechanics; the blind accidents are what keep them human."

The complexity of the plan is a huge part of the appeal as well, particularly if it is depicted in a visually arresting manner. "Film is extremely good both at laying out the details of complicated processes and at capturing, on the fly, moments of spontaneity; the balance between them is never more evident than it is in a first-rate heist picture, because elaborate crimes are among the few human activities that movies dare to show us the step-by-step process of. Writing a perfect sonnet is at least as difficult as knocking over a bank — and as susceptible to the mysterious operations of chance — but who wants to watch Yeats stare out the window and scratch his head for 90 minutes, even if, in the end, he pulls off ‘Leda and the Swan'? All in all we'd rather look at guys digging tunnels and emptying safe-deposit boxes."

Rafferty finds most of the recent entries in the genre more comic than tense; there's not much nail-biting in the Ocean's pictures or the remake of The Italian Job. He also can't help but notice that the criminals are getting away with the loot more often than they did in the past. In these respects, The Bank Job "is something of a novelty these days, a throwback to the good old days of the heist movie, when the purloining of large quantities of money and/or valuables from heavily guarded institutions seemed at least a little, I don't know, dangerous."

"The Bank Job": Lock, Stock, and Dirty Pictures

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The Bank Job a new British film directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Jason Statham, offers a twist on a spectacular true crime story. In September 1971, someone broke into the vault of Lloyds Bank in London on Baker Street, tunneling through a concrete floor from forty feet away, and made off with more than three million pounds' worth of loot from the safety deposit boxes. It was an audacious heist — the biggest bank robbery in British history — but what was even more remarkable was the way the story suddenly disappeared from the newspapers a few days later. As Will Lawrence reports, "This was prompted by the issuing of a D Notice, a government order that forbids the press from reporting on certain events. Ordinarily, such a measure would be employed only if the story threatened national security. So why was it slapped on this particular story? What else did the robbers find in those safety deposit boxes?" Dick Clement, who co-wrote the movie with his writing partner Ian La Frenais, thinks he knows. Clement, who has been working on getting a movie project based on the story for almost ten years, says he got the straight dope from George McIndoe, who once tried to sell the idea himself to Hollywood when memories of the robbery itself were still fresh. McIndoe, who claimed to have gotten his information from two of the robbers themselves, reported that the thieves had found "sexually compromising photographs of Princess Margaret inside one of the deposit boxes."

According to the theory offered up by McIndoe and the screenwriters, the pictures supposedly belonged to Michael X, the drug-dealer, pimp, extortionist, and questionable political leader who was immortalized, in fictionalized form, by V. S. Naipaul in his novel Guerrillas, and later in Naipaul's long journalistic essay "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad." In the movie, Michael X (who died in 1975) uses the photos to keep the law at bay, threatening to make them public unless he was given a wide berth by the authorities. The writers suggest "that the robbery was masterminded by MI5, which was eager to get its hands on the photos and thereby neutralise Michael X's threat." "That's the theory, anyway," adds Clement, invoking the time-honored escape hatch of conspiracy theorists since time immortal. Audiences can chew all this over when The Bank Job opens in Britain later this month. Others have already made up their minds — such as Robert Rowlands, a ham radio operator who tried to alert the police that the robbery was underway when he intercepted the burglars' walkie-talkie transmissions. "The film is an amusing series of misconceptions, dragging in royalty," he says cheerfully. "I am in touch with the princess's solicitors."