by If you clicked on this article expecting it to be about James McAvoy, then I’m afraid to say that you’ve been duped.
We will get to the dishy Scotsman eventually, but really, this isn’t about him. No, this article is in fact about an English actor, perhaps the greatest English actor of all time. I am, of course, talking about the one and only… Jason Statham.
The ‘ardest ‘ardman to ever ‘ard, the egg-headed icon only has one mode – a gruff, no-nonsense geezer who doesn’t suffer fools gladly and likes killing people almost as much as he likes a bacon sandwich. For decades now, ‘The Stath’ has played the same character over and over again, yet his popularity and drawing power haven’t waned. When you’re good at something, why bother trying anything else?
When it comes to the best entry in the former diver’s catalogue, there are a lot of categories to consider. Do you go for the ones that are genuinely quite good, like his early collaborations with Guy Ritchie? Or the ones that are fun to watch because they’re completely ridiculous, like the wonderfully titled The Beekeeper? Maybe you like your Statham to be as big and silly as possible, in which case you can’t go wrong with The Meg, in which he battles a giant prehistoric shark. According to the man himself, there are six of his films you need to watch. The rest, in his words, are “shite”.
Perhaps the go-to publication for all things Stath is the culture website Den of Geek. They unashamedly love him to the point where they used to ask almost all of their celebrity guests to pick their favourite Statham movie, regardless of what they were being interviewed about. Jason Segel picked The Transporter, while Evan Goldberg opted for his big-screen debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
This is where McAvoy comes in. He was interviewed by Den of Geek in 2014, ostensibly to promote the upcoming release of his movie Filth on DVD. In true DoG fashion, they asked the star for his favourite Statham flick, and he gave probably the greatest answer in the question’s long history. “Crank,” he told them. “Because he got the line, ‘Does it look like I’ve got cunt written on my head?’. That is the best line I’ve ever heard in a film.”
Crank is, quite simply put, mad. Statham plays a man named Chev Chelios who, after a run-in with an assassin, is poisoned with a drug that will kill him if his adrenaline drops below a certain level. In order to live long enough to enact his revenge, Chev has to keep his heart rate up by any means necessary. This includes fighting the police, getting into scraps with gangsters, and having sex with his girlfriend in public. If you thought that was crazy, you should see Crank 2: High Voltage, in which Chev has his heart replaced with a synthetic one that requires regular jolts of electricity in order to stay functioning.
A true cult classic, Crank is a favourite among many ‘Stath-heads’, James McAvoy included. Maybe one day we’ll get the long-awaited Crank 3. It simply has to happen.
