Word: statham
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That man is Jensen Ames (Anglo action star Jason Statham), an ex-con steelworker who for the moment is happily at home with his loving wife and adorable infant. All that changes when wifey is stabbed to death and Jensen wakes up next to her corpse with a bloody knife in his hand. He's quickly convicted and sent off to Terminal Island, where Hennessey awaits him with the chance to get out by assuming the guise of Frankenstein in the imminent three-day rally. "I'm offering you your freedom, Mr. Ames," she says. "If that's not worth...
...anyone's guess why a California lockup is housing an unreconstructed Limey like Statham; he's one of those English stars who shows up every few decades (like Cary Grant or Michael Caine) and refuses to drop his working-class, home-town accent. Anderson must have figured that the star of the Transporter series, and The Bank Job and a couple of Guy Ritchie gangland fantasies, would bring along his action-film bona fides. Which he does. Also his impressive torso. One of the movie's few moments of relative repose is a long, loving shot of Statham exercising...
...Further, while Statham and his rivals could kill only one another, the drivers in Death Race 2000 can run up the score by knocking off pedestrians: 40 points for a teenager, 100 for anyone over 70. Frankenstein, whose lizard-green car sports fangs from its grille, is considered the good guy because, when he drives up to an old folks' home, he leaves the seniors alone and kills only a half-dozen doctors and nurses. In fact, Frank harbors his own insurrectionist tendencies. He's got an explosive embedded in his palm (it's not called a hand grenade...
MOVIES Death Race Written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson; rated R; out now Cars, cons, guns and girls: that's how to write finis to an action-movie summer. In this more violent, less anarchic remake of the 1975 Death Race 2000, Jason Statham is the star driver for evil warden Joan Allen. We like the industrial-brutalist look of the film and its flair for gaudy car-nage. But in one way, this is like Hamlet 2: the original was better...
...Bank Job Directed by Roger Donaldson; rated R; out July 15 Based on the 1971 robbery of a London bank, this savory heist film adds spicy photos of aristocrats to the haul. Jason Statham, ever the East End Bruce Willis, leads the amateur cracksmen as they get tangled in about 56 subplots involving MI5, good and bad cops, porn dealers, black radicals and jealous wives. A burly, burrowing pleasure...