Jason Statham’s Pax Americana

Eighty minutes into his latest #1 movie, A Working Man, Jason Statham has gone beyond scorched Earth on the members large and small of a Russian mob cabal that made the mistake of kidnapping his boss’s daughter for its human trafficking side hustle. But a translucent leather-clad loner with a steampunk machine gun bursts into the frame with his unrelenting stream of bullets and wildman screaming. Mildly nonplussed, Statham nods his head as he says, “Let’s kill this guy.”

It’s a showy, nonsensical moment in a film that, more often than not, resembles a remake of Taken. But it’s also a rousingly badass beat that only the Stath could pull off, one sorely missing from Hollywood’s overly safe and coldly CGI’d landscape. 

When it debuted in theaters last weekend to the tune of more than $15 million at the domestic box office, A Working Man stunned Hollywood number crunchers by dethroning Disney’s Snow White as the number one movie in America just a week after that beleaguered blockbuster’s release. As The Hollywood Reporter put it, this “blue-collar” drama saw “Middle America” taking charge of pop culture. 

One may wonder why five months after the Trump/Vance ticket secured a decisive victory that Middle American upsets still seem like an aberration among creative professionals. Such is especially true since Statham rang in the first big weekend of 2024 with another #1 movie, The Beekeeper, which found him battling a telemarketing scam ring led by a clear stand-in for Hunter Biden. Despite their supposed expertise in tracking the national pulse, the country’s most lauded media figures have nothing on a 57-year-old British action star whose formulaic action movies more adeptly parse out America today than any feature in New York or Vanity Fair could.

In an era of America First and Liberation Day tariffs, it seems peculiar that the nation’s action movie legacy would rest on a Brit who got his start in Guy Ritchie’s 1998 breakout Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. However, in contrast to The Rock’s focus on cultivating his own increasingly corporate social media presence or the direct-to-video geezer teasers featuring former heavy hitters Dolph Lundgren, Mel Gibson, and—in their heyday—Bruce Willis, Statham has managed to position himself as a perpetual underdog.

He’s a cypher. His films refuse to focus on his penchant for martial arts choreography or winky one-liners. Americans rush out to see what inanely elaborate stunt Tom Cruise will pull off in the latest Mission: Impossible. But Statham works because he invites us to see ourselves in his character, a fish out of water and a man out of time, who often feels the world has left him behind until it realizes he’s the force his community can’t do without. As he says in the opening of 2008’s Death Race remake, “I’m a working man. Just like you.” 

Given that Statham’s most successful films focus on this capacity for restorative violence, it should come as little surprise that the type of action flicks on which he has built his career are an amalgamation of the western and detective movie—two stalwart genres from Hollywood’s golden age. During its 80s peak, the action movie’s top draws from Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jean-Claude Van Damme to the American-born Australian-raised Gibson were—Willis notwithstanding—largely first or second-generation immigrants whose success in their movies and real life defined the American Dream.

However, the careers and action aesthetics that made what Nick De Semlyen refers to as “The Last Action Heroes” were unable to weather the War on Terror and the economic downturns that showed Americans souring on George W. Bush’s cowboy persona, ousting his party from Congress and the White House in 2006 and 2008 respectively. 

Thus, the aughts marked a complete shift for the era’s action output. Irish Liam Neeson become an action A-Lister, Welsh Christian Bale resurrected Batman, Scottish James McAvoy became a hitman in Wanted, and fellow Scotsman Gerard Butler brought new meaning to what Susan Jeffords called the “hard body” of the Reagan Era with his turn in 300 before settling down in dad action fare like Law Abiding Citizen and Gamer. Even Superman went continental when Henry Cavill took the reins of the hero. Not to mention Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland’s Spider-Men. Like the working-class fans that make up the genre’s target demo, the action film traded in tried-and-true Americans and exported their jobs overseas. 

Yet, in contrast to this down-and-dirty British invasion, Statham had more in common with his 80s predecessors. Unlike Neeson, who became Hollywood’s top action draw by playing it safe as an accent-neutral everyman with a very special set of skills, the Stath relishes in his Cockney speech role after role whether fighting prehistoric sharks with a multinational cast in The Meg or battling it out on the streets of New Orleans with a meth head James Franco in 2013’s Homefront. He’s the type of immigrant Vivek Ramaswamy conveniently overlooked in his career-immolating X rant last Christmas, but who best illustrates the former DOGE co-mastermind’s point. 

Such may explain why Statham’s strongest projects have been collaborations with Stallone, who wrote both A Working Man and Homefront as well as governed The Expendables universe, which saw the Brit as the Italian Stallion’s closest friend and confidante. In Statham, Stallone has found a worthy successor, another underdog one-man army who can take on the world. But, while Stallone cultivated a persona as an overly serious pseudo-superhero ripe for parody toward the end of his peak, Statham has stayed in on the joke.

He knows punching a megalodon before taking it out with a spear or setting an assassin on fire with a makeshift Molotov cocktail made from a jar of honey is over the top. Still–like Buster Keaton before him–he’s as unafraid to look ridiculous for his audience’s amusement (those finding such a comparison off-base need look no further than 2009’s Crank: High Voltage). He doesn’t patronize or set himself up as a role model. He just gets the job done and comes back for more without giving even the slightest indication that he’s above it all.

Though Statham’s Hollywood action ascendancy could serve as yet another example of American decline, his dedication to hardscrabble values and the nation’s communities that typically only grace our screens in Oscar bait about the other half shows that he buys into the promise of our oft-derided American experiment. Anglophilia is typically a rarified hobby for those of a continental stock, who would rather craft Instagram stories from the Old Country while they express their dread of returning to our backward ways. But Statham is no Prince Harry. He’s proof that our exported ideals still continue to resonate abroad. And he’s happily at home on America’s movie screens.

A Working Man is now playing in theaters.