Hum­ming­bird

Anoth­er Jason Statham movie. Sor­ry, make that, ANOTH­ER JASON STATHAM MOVIE! Which means more of Britain’s pri­mo hardman/​skinhead doing what he does best – name­ly pum­melling low-rent crooks in clam­my back­alleys, hurl­ing City boys from high-rise cock­tail bars and gen­er­al­ly get­ting him­self in and out of all man­ner of scrapes in the most lung-bust­ing­ly vio­lent fash­ion imaginable.

Well, yes, Hum­ming­bird has all of that, but more sig­nif­i­cant­ly it strives to expose the warm, nougaty cen­tre hid­den beneath 50 lay­ers of dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly stub­bled man­husk. Resul­tant­ly, like find­ing out pro­fes­sion­al wrestling is fake, or that your favourite prime­time enter­tain­er fan­cies chil­dren, the direc­to­r­i­al debut from East­ern Promis­es-scribe Steven Knight is some­thing of a world-shat­ter­ing expe­ri­ence. This is the film that intro­duces us to the Stath’s sen­si­tive side. If that hasn’t put you off, it should. Not through any fault of Statham’s, but because the jar­ring mix of vis­cer­al action and emo­tion­al­ly-charged dra­ma fails to meld into a cohe­sive, engag­ing story.

We meet trou­bled Afghanistan vet Joey Jones (Statham) scrap­ping for his sup­per on the mean streets of Lon­don. When a gang of pet­ty thugs sets upon the young girl with whom he has formed an unspec­i­fied bond, Joey fucks them up before flee­ing the scene. He then oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly assumes anoth­er man’s iden­ti­ty and vows to get his life back on track, find­ing work in a Chi­nese kitchen before being pro­mot­ed to the rank of mul­ti­pur­pose goon when his restaurateur/​crimelord boss wit­ness­es him kick sev­er­al lumps out of a group of lag­gered footy lads. Mean­while Joey seeks com­fort from demure soup kitchen vol­un­teer Sis­ter Cristi­na (Aga­ta Buzek), whose third-act cri­sis of faith seems to have been writ­ten in pure­ly to jus­ti­fy her and Joey’s sud­den and weird­ly anti-cli­mac­tic romance.

The fact that the film has been rebrand­ed ​‘Redemp­tion’ in the US smacks of mar­ket­ing cyn­i­cism, but it’s a far more apt title than the orig­i­nal, which it tran­spires is a ref­er­ence to our protagonist’s exten­sive men­tal scar­ring – in one scene Stath suf­fers a vod­ka-fuelled melt­down when a swarm of CG hum­ming­birds invades the swanky loft apart­ment he’s quite lit­er­al­ly fall­en upon. It’s painful to watch, but not the rea­sons intend­ed. This recur­ring motif alludes to var­i­ous trau­mat­ic episodes from Joey’s mil­i­tary ser­vice; lat­er we learn that he’s lying low to avoid a court-mar­tial for wrong­ly exe­cut­ing a ter­ror sus­pect, an event we expe­ri­ence in heavy-hand­ed flash­back sequences that book­end the film.

If only Hum­ming­bird had some­thing mean­ing­ful to say about the mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion of vet­er­ans, addicts and home­less peo­ple in soci­ety. Instead this joy­less, tonal­ly schiz­o­phrenic slab of qua­si-social real­ism-cum-revenge thriller gets bogged down in cliché and bad dia­logue as Joey grunts and punch­es his way to sal­va­tion, paus­ing now and then to have a sob and preach repen­tance for his myr­i­ad sins.