Ah, the film career of Jason Statham: or as I always think of it, the gift that keeps on giving. While there is inevitably a shadow over the prospects of Mr Statham's highest-profile release for 2014, Fast and Furious 7, this year has been a good one for Shirebrook's most famous son – by which I mean that none of his films has been an Expendables, and one of them (Hummingbird) was genuinely really good. Now, with the Christmas season upon us, we have one last treat featuring the great man (and a supporting cast of actors whom, it must said, once looked set for better things than secondary roles in mid-budget genre movies).

This is not to say that Gary Fleder's Homefront is by any stretch of the imagination a family-friendly Christmas movie. As you might expect, it is rather too high both in terms of its people-beaten-to-a-pulp quotient and effing-and-jeffing-o-meter for that. My esteemed editor might even find himself moved to describe it as another 'dystopian opera of urban pain' were it not for the fact that much of it takes place in the countryside.

Jason Statham plays, as ever, the Jason Statham Character, who in this film is in his maverick cop incarnation: an uproariously silly opening sequence sees him working undercover with a gang of meth-dealing bikers (crystal meth is so modish these days), before taking them down in a shootout and bike chase that leaves the substance of his wig wholly unruffled.

Thankfully, at this point the film calms down and the action relocates to rural Louisiana, two years later. Following the unelaborated-upon death of his wife, the Jason Statham Character has retired to the remote countryside to raise his young daughter and renovate a rattly old house. Louisiana looks beautiful and for most of the movie, the direction is moody and effective, picking up on the details of small-town life.

One of the neater twists in the script is the way that what looks like a minor character moment actually turns out to be the inciting incident for the entire plot of the film: the local school bully tries to pick on Statham's daughter and, being her father's girl, she promptly lamps him. Statham is called in for a meeting with the school counsellor (Rachelle Lefevre), following which the other kid's parents confront him, so he promptly goes in for a spot of lamping himself.

This does not sit well with the mother of the bully (an almost unrecognisable Kate Bosworth, whose A-list career was a casualty of the great Superman Returns disaster), who realises that her useless husband is not up to the task of restoring the family honour. So she gets on the phone to her brother Gator (James Franco). Gator is the local drugs manufacturer, but it's his credentials as a general headcase that she's more interested in. Through his girlfriend (Winona Ryder) he happens to have connections with some of the gangs that Statham, in his former life, was such a nuisance to, which may prove pertinent to the unfolding plot...

Now, it would really be stretching a point to claim that Homefront is anything more than a competently-made mid-range genre movie, but it does a pretty decenty job of balancing the action and thriller beats this kind of film requires with a clever and coherent script that – for the most part – departs from the planet Earth no more than is absolutely necessary. I see the actual screenplay is based on a novel by Chuck Logan, but written for the screen by and up-and-coming young talent named... hang on a minute, let me check my notes... Sylvester Stallone. (Sylvester, huh? Sounds like a bookish, sensitive young chap.) Well, young Stallone me laddo, if you're reading this, the script for Homefront is really quite good, and you have a great future ahead of you as a screenwriter – but I would still be careful not to get stuck in the action movie ghetto.

The film tries especially hard to make the escalation from playground clash of egos to full-auto matter of life and death seem half-way credible, and it succeeds up to a point. Unfortunately the story not only requires Statham to keep a massive personal arsenal under his bed (somewhat at odds with the careful nature of the character on this occasion), but also to have detailed files on all his past cases lying unsecured around the house, so this is at most rather qualified success.

Anyone hoping for another instance of Mr Statham really stretching himself as a performer, as in Hummingbird, is probably going to be disappointed, too. The closest thing to an innovation in his characterisation here is making him a single parent, and even here one is inevitably reminded of his relationship with Catherine Chan in last year's Safe. This is yet another movie which ducks the possibility of giving Statham an actual on-screen romance, although there are hints of something potentially on the cards with Lefevre's character. In the end it really just boils down to Statham doing his usual thing with his usual facility – the hard-man-code-of-honour-soft-side-no-nonsense-wise-cracking-one-liner thing. The fights are good this time, as are the one-liners (the best one comes at the end of a three-against-one fight and goes: 'When I get home tonight, I'm going to tell my daughter a story. And this is how it ends:' *KER-THWOK*).

A definite plus to the movie, however, is the presence of James Franco as the chief antagonist. Franco's not the most obvious choice of opponent for Statham, and I've been fairly rude about his acting on occasion in the past, but he manages to give Gator a dead-pan quirkiness that lifts him above the level of the stereotyped bad guy he could very easily have been. He's an oddly likeable character, initially at least, even though the film also makes it quite clear that in many ways he's an irredeemable scumbag.

But there isn't anything particularly outstanding about Homefront – it's a film of extremely modest ambitions that manages to hit the targets it sets itself in a highly polished and competent way. It's a Jason Statham action thriller. It's a pretty good Jason Statham action thriller, with a relatively sensible plot and decent performances. But it still doesn't transcend the limits of the genre in any meaningful sense worth mentioning. I had a good time watching it, but then I would – and I suspect that in a few years time I'll struggle to remember which scenes were in this one, as opposed to The Mechanic or Parker. A solid movie, but basically meat-and-potatoes stuff for Mr Statham and his fans.

Awix

16.12.13 Front Page

Back Issue Page