Hummingbird is a British thriller starring Jason Statham which may be all you need to know to keep away and if it is, can’t say I blame you. Statham is the actor who rose to fame as one of Guy Ritchie’s entourage and now plays bad-ass, hard-boiled action heroes of the kind who can take on whole armies and crack open all their heads and emerge breathless, admittedly, yet with only one small graze. I normally avoid his films and films of this type as they are just not my thing — you’d think anyone who could take on whole armies and emerge with just a single graze would be interesting, but not so much — yet I was seduced into giving it a shot. It looked promising.
It’s more a character study than a mindless action flick, I was told, and a departure for Statham. Plus, it’s the directorial debut of Steven Knight, the writer whose scripts for Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things have rightly won awards and acclaim. Does it succeed? Not especially, plus it contains lines like: ‘You tell me what happened to her, or I’m going to kill you with this spoon.’ If there has to be violence, I actually don’t mind the odd spoon-killing, but that’s about as positive as I can be.
The story: Statham is Joey Smith, a homeless, alcoholic ex-soldier who is living on the streets of London. He has served in Afghanistan, and was traumatised by events there, as shown in flashbacks that flash back quite often, just so we know. Anyway, after a violent incident — very, I’m afraid — he flees the street and breaks into an empty penthouse. On discovering the owner will be away for a few months, he assumes his identity and has one of those epiphanies whereby he gives up the vodka and decides to get his life back on track.
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