Film review: I was right: a British thriller starring Jason Statham is to be avoided

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.