Wild Card: Another Day, Another Beatdown for Jason Statham
It’s another faceless, empty, and boring “one of a thousand” Jason Statham movies, where he plays a tough guy who beats up other tough guys. Details aren’t important in this kind of film, and frankly, they’re non-existent. A “Statham movie” is a diagnosis and a sentence.
Life in Las Vegas is both a blessing and a curse for Nick. A man with a questionable past and a not-so-legal present, he doesn’t raise any eyebrows here, unless he’s looking for trouble. Nick tries to avoid trouble. He works as a bodyguard, sometimes gambles himself, but more often guides his not-so-brave clients to casinos, dreaming of one day winning big and escaping to Europe. Those dreams are shattered when an old acquaintance asks Nick for help – a mafia boss’s unhinged son nearly beat her to death. Nick knows he shouldn’t get involved, but he’s a gambler, and a passionate one. The bet is placed….je movie “Wild Card””)
The idea for the film belongs to Jason Statham himself. According to director Simon West, the actor worked on it for over five years, taking inspiration from the drama “Heat” (1986) starring Burt Reynolds.
The Statham Formula: Is It Getting Old?
Back in the glory days of video stores and VHS tapes with two movies and a cartoon crammed onto them, no one thought to complain that Arnold Schwarzenegger played the same taciturn tough guys, Eddie Murphy played the same fool in every film, and Bruce Lee didn’t even try to act, just waved his arms and legs. Now, viewers are oversaturated with cinema, uniformity irritates them, and the easy choice from thousands of films is corrupting. And now the careers of the likes of Nicolas Cage or John Cusack, who don’t want to expand their acting boundaries and prefer to play, in the opinion of many, the same thing, are collapsing. Some will call it laziness, others style, but both will admit – “monotonous” actors exist..jpg “Still from the movie “Wild Card””)
Originally, Brian De Palma was slated to direct, but Simon West replaced him by the start of filming. This is West and Statham’s third collaboration after “The Mechanic” and “The Expendables 2.”
Jason Statham is at the forefront of this acting brotherhood. Not at all ashamed of playing essentially the same character for a good decade, Statham continues to sign up for “Protector,” “Parker,” “Hummingbird Effect,” and other projects that are impossible to distinguish from each other even under a microscope. Rare moves “beyond the flags,” like the image tried on in “Spy,” are more of an exception that proves the rule: “A Statham movie is 60 minutes of talk about how he doesn’t want to fight, and 30 minutes of fights.”
Plot? What Plot?
I don’t even want to talk about the plot of “Wild Card.” The whole story fits on a notebook page, the dialogues were clearly invented at the last moment, and a couple of characters were clearly introduced artificially just to stretch the runtime to what is expected of an action movie. To the delight of fans, let’s admit, the juicy hand-to-hand combat scenes of Statham’s character are still impressive (tablespoons in his hands are scarier than the opponents’ pistols), but is it worth watching the whole movie for that? A rhetorical question.
Using the card terminology set by the title of the film, let’s say that “Wild Card” missed the trump cards. The dubious lady of hearts is shown here exclusively in a badly crumpled state, so there is no way to appreciate her beauty, the mafia king performed by Stanley Tucci seems to have wandered into the frame from a neighboring set, Milo Ventimiglia’s jack is deliberately stupid, angry, and caricaturedly narcissistic. Joker Nick beats this whole deck with some laziness, apathy, and doom – they say, this human bottom doesn’t deserve anything else. Statham likes to add tragedy to his films, peculiar, angular, naive, exactly the kind of drama that a man with a number of fractures exceeding his age imagines. You can’t watch Nick’s reflections on fears and fate without laughter, but, you can’t spoil such a movie with it. What is there to spoil?
The Appeal of the Familiar
Another thing is that Statham doesn’t need to change anything. He is loved like this. They expect the Transporter, the Mechanic, that damn Chev Chelios, working on adrenaline injections or electric shocks. And Jason is happy to try – he thrashes villains with scope and pleasure, gladly takes heroic poses and wrinkles his face in righteous anger, killing is always a small crime against his own principles for his character, but this killing is inevitable, because Statham’s hero is the last resort, the highest court, from which there is no salvation, redemption, or indulgence.
Of course, such crafts are only nominally related to cinema – there is no ingenuity, no character development, no plot twists, no more or less intelligible acting. As there were none in the B-movies of the late 80s. And the audience for all this was. There is now, it’s a gambling game in which both sides are mired – we need more films with Statham, and Jason is ready to provide them in any quantity, but, as they say, in complete relaxation. If these rules suit you, deal the cards, it’s your turn.