Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives

Hello readers.  I wanted to start off by thanking everyone for the positive comments.  I really appreciate your support.  Also, there seems to be a hankering for some talk about romantic comedies.  Don't worry, it's in the works.  If you want to see the rom-coms I'll be discussing, check out High Fidelity, Love Actually, and Ten Things I Hate About You.  These are all movies worth seeing at some point anyway, so if you can catch one soon, that would be fantastic.

Right, I promised in the last post that I would do a review of either Snatch, The Machinist, Star Wars Episode 1, or Death Race.  I may have been lying, but only a little.  I will be talking about Death Race, to be sure, but this is not a review.  This is my musings about Jason Statham and the movie industry.  To start, if you have no idea what Death Race is, here's the trailer:

How does that look to you?  Gratuitously violent and pointless?  Probably.  Now I'll show you the trailer for The Hurt Locker, this year's Best Picture according the the Academy Awards.  (Therefore not definitive.)


This might be one of the only times you will see those two trailers in sequence.  Why is that?  I set out to explore the answer to that question.  Here's what I found.

First off, the numbers.  Death Race grossed about $36 million in the US during its theatrical run.  The Hurt Locker grossed a little over $12.5 million.  Ok, that tells us that more people have seen Death Race.  But here's the weird thing:  Every person I have talked to about Death Race says it was not a good movie.  Some hated it.  I have yet to meet a person who did not love The Hurt Locker.  Now, the people that I talk to are a small sample size.  So let's look bigger picture.  Check rottentomatoes.com.  (Or let me do it for you.)  On top critics, Death Race received a score of 43%.  The Hurt Locker got a 97%.  That's a monster difference.  This also means that more than 1 in 2 reviews of Death Race were unfavorable.  For The Hurt Locker, about 3 in 100 reviews were unfavorable.

So how does that reconcile with the fact that almost three times as many people saw Death Race in theaters?  Well, either people don't read reviews, or they ignore them.  Or, when in doubt, people go for Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives, because it's simple, it's visceral, and it's fun.  And that's where Jason Statham comes in.

If you don't know who Jason Statham is, here's a link.  You may notice that almost every movie he has appeared in is an action movie.  I'm going to let you in on a little secret.  He plays the same character in almost every movie.  Same accent, same haircut, every time.  He's always the action star who drives around kicking ass and taking names, with an emphasis on the kicking ass part.  Do I think he's not a good actor because of this?  No.  I think he's about average.  But he certainly has made a great career for being "about average".

Now, the point I'm getting at here is that with Jason Statham, you know what you're getting.  You're getting something reliable.  Something you've seen before and enjoyed.  Something proven.  And people will pay for that reliability.  As Rade Sherbedgia says in Snatch, "I always go for reliability.  [And] if it does not work you can always hit them with it."  He's talking about a gun.  I'm talking about movies.  Something reliable can be sold, because, like a gun, even if it doesn't work, it still functions as a blunt instrument.  You just have to hit someone with it.

And it's a cyclical process.  Movie-goers pay for the reliable movie, and studios pay for the reliable movie-goer.  That's the brilliance of Statham.  The Transporter has two sequels.  Crank has one.  He plays the same character every time.  That's reliability.  He's not acting, he working.  He is part of the assembly line process of making movies.  But I don't hold that against him.  He's just a regular guy, working for his paycheck.  That fact that his paycheck is a lot bigger than mine is irrelevant.

The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, was not reliable.  It turned out to be awesome, but that was uncertain going in.  You couldn't bank on it.  The fact that it won just about every award it could win was unforeseen.  And that's a risk for any studio with any indie project.  You never know how it will turn out.  But if you've got Statham, you've got a surefire winner.  It won't win many awards, but it'll pay the bills.

I've got a few final thoughts here, and then I'll wrap up.  I like Death Race.  I really do.  Just because it's not a "good" movie by my standards doesn't mean I can't watch and enjoy it.  See my post about the QWERTY scale for more on that.  Also, I like Jason Statham.  He appears in one of my All-Time Top 10 Movie Scenes.  (It's the opening scene from Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels.  It's also his first movie appearance.)

So before you see another movie, think about what you want.  Are you willing to take a risk on a movie you don't know?  Or do you want something reliable?  Remember, what is reliable for some is not enjoyable for others.  You have to define it for yourself.  But for me, reliable is Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives.

-Harry

P.S.  Don't hold your breath for the romantic comedies post.  It's coming, I promise, but it might not be the very next post.  Be patient.

Request:  In the comments section, please talk about what actors, directors, genres, etc. are reliable for you.     I'd like to know what kind of movies you guys like, so I can talk about the most relevant films for you.