As I see it, Hollywood currently has four stables of movie talent:
- Movie-movie stars (Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep)
- HBO-movie stars (Colin Farrell, Steve Carell, Anthony Mackie, and anyone whose TV shows have movie vibes and movies have TV vibes)
- Streaming-movie stars (Millie Bobby Brown, post-Avengers: Endgame Chris Pratt)
- Plane-movie stars
As I headed to Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest on a cramped United Airlines flight, I went looking for a movie to stream. I scrolled through new-release options that didn’t fit the mood — a reviled sequel I skipped? A musical that will inevitably suffer on bad headphones? A much-lauded 2024 Iranian film? — and I couldn’t help but think that plane-movie stars are the entertainment industry’s most important but undervalued commodity.
Jason Statham is the current king of plane movies. Protect Jason Statham at all costs. His latest achievement, A Working Man, got me through some really tough times (by which I mean 20 minutes of turbulence over Missouri).
A plane star like Statham could be confused for a movie-movie star — he certainly leads and succeeds in real movies that open in theaters. He might look rinky-dinkier than HBO-movie or streaming-movie stars, because talent of his ilk rarely graces magazine covers. (Even though you frequently see those magazines at airports. Go figure.) But plane stars deserve as much praise as any of the celebs in the other categories.
A guy like Statham has the physical and mental combination required to captivate viewers trapped in economy-sized seating at 30,000 feet. Plane-movie star roles don’t require nuance, but they do require grit. A plane star balances action, romance, comedy, and charm without flinching, and delivers it with a lack of ego. (Note: Starring in an actual movie called Plane is not a requirement, although Gerard Butler is a plane-movie A-lister.)
With zero Oscars, zero significant franchises to his name, and a commitment to never stooping to television acting, Statham has redefined the merit of plane-movie stardom. A Working Man might even be good to watch while not on a plane. (It’s streaming on Amazon Prime Video, the unlikely purveyor of many quality plane movies and minter of plane movie stars.)
In A Working Man, Statham plays Levon Cade, an ex-black ops soldier who has found a second life working as a construction foreman in Chicago. This binary is extremely important to the plane-star calculus: Levon isn’t some John Wick-like assassin out for revenge, killing nonstop to please action junkies. No, Levon is a regular guy, a working man, so to speak. (See the title). And writer-director David Ayer, adapting Chuck Dixon’s book Levon’s Trade with none other than co-writer Sylvester Stallone, makes sure to establish his future hero as a down-to-earth, clock-in-clock-out dad type. He treats his crew well, his bosses love him, he’s gifted lunch by multiple co-workers’ extended family members who just think he’s swell, and in the off hours, he fights to retain custody of his daughter. He’s working, man!!
When Levon’s boss’ own daughter, Jenny, is kidnapped by Russian sex traffickers while out at a club — truly terrifying/screwed-up — Levon puts down his hard hat and picks up his hand grenades in order to save the day. He’s a reluctant hero (a must-have trope in a great plane action movie) but he can’t deny the call to action, even if it risks capsizing the progress he’s made with the suit-wearing schmuck lawyers who threaten to take his kid away. But who else could break the number of mafia-goon arms necessary to get Jenny back? Not Michael Peña, who plays her affable dad in a welcome dramatic turn.
There is lots of running and gunning in A Working Man, which I will admit pales in comparison to The Beekeeper, Jason Statham’s all-time great plane movie, which is also in circulation on a number of major airlines, and also streaming on Prime Video. In that 2024 film, the plane star plays another basically unkillable special agent who has retired to the Regular Joe hobby of… beekeeping… but once again avenges the everyman, this time an elderly woman who has fallen victim to a phishing scam that has left her penniless.
Ayer also directed The Beekeeper, which goes a bit harder on the comedy — before the credits roll, Statham beats up cartoonish computer brats, spiky-haired assassins, and a wannabe Elon Musk played by Josh Hutcherson — but it’s all calibrated for plane viewing. There’s intimate, small-scale action that still feels cinematic. There are larger-than-life heroes and villains still cut from the American experience. There’s Statham, a fish-out-of-water Brit, who can crack a smile in a moment of sweetness before, two seconds later, beating the bloody hell out of someone who clearly deserved it, because the morals in plane movies are black and white. He is a master of performing it all. Also see: The Meg and Wrath of Man. (But not the Fast & Furious movies, which waste Statham’s plane-movie mojo.)
There are other emerging plane-movie-star titans dominating other plane-movie genre spaces; Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell may have fully shifted over to the category with their rom-com You’re Cordially Invited, which debuted on Prime Video, where but absolutely no one watched it. (But you can catch it on airplanes right now.) Jennifer Lopez also feels destined for this respectable career arc, now that she’s done cashing big checks for Netflix in Titanfall-esque blockbusters. (Prime Video, knowing what’s up, did her a solid in the action rom-com Shotgun Wedding).
But Statham remains the top-tier plane-movie star, and A Working Man could not be an easier layup — so much so that it’s worth recommending a watch at home, if you aren’t planning on traveling this summer. You may need to prepare the right viewing-room conditions, though: Consider a daytime watch of A Working Man on an iPad-sized screen, positioned a few inches from your face, with window shutters mostly closed, so it’s dim but not dark. Statham optimized this one for you.
The post You should watch dumb Jason Statham plane movies at home, too appeared first on Polygon.
