For over 20 years, Jason Statham has been one of the most prolific and popular action heroes Hollywood has to offer, even if silver screen stardom was never on his mind until he was bitten by the acting bug.
He may have been practicing martial arts since he was a child, but his heart wasn’t set on using those skills in films from a young age. Statham competed for England at the 1990 Commonwealth Games before a combination of a burgeoning modeling career and a history as a salesman of legally dubious goods led to his acting debut in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. .
Soon after, Hollywood came calling: Corey Yuen’s The Transporter inadvertently laid the foundation for an entire subgenre when it first cast Statham as the lead in a mid-budget action film. More precisely, he cast him as the military and/or law enforcement veteran leading the film with either a one-word title or a two-word moniker prefixed with “The,” which became a template the star always stuck to. With.
“London”, “Chaos”, “Crank”, “War”, “Mechanic”, “Blitz”, “Safe”, “Parker”, “Hummingbird”, “Homefront”, “Meg” and “Beekeeper”
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– this is just some of the titles that used this formula, and his contributions to the Expendables and Fast and Furious franchises continued to raise his star even higher.
Although Statham has demonstrated his martial arts prowess dozens of times over the years, he has never appeared in a martial arts film, at least not in the strictest definition of the term. And yet, as he told Rotten Tomatoes, he was most influenced by one of the art form’s most iconic examples.
“If we want to talk about the movies that have made an impact in what I do in the action realm – Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. I’ve watched that countless times,” he explained. “That is a standalone pioneer in action movies, and anyone that was inspired by Bruce Lee… I’m sure everyone that has ever done an action movie has just drooled over how full of talent Bruce Lee was, and how unique he was”.
Recalling his astonishment at Lee being “so avant-garde, he’s years above, so far ahead of his own time”, Statham included himself as one of the people who “try to emulate him in whatever way they can”. Almost any actor who performs martial arts on-screen on a regular basis owes at least one small debut of gratitude to the legendary Lee, and Statham is more than happy to admit he’s among them.
He probably didn’t imagine he’d experience such longevity as an action hero the first time he saw Enter the Dragon, but its fingerprints have been all over his filmography ever since he first roundhouse kicked some poor disposable henchman square in the face.