Disc Reviews

Hummingbird Review

• 6th Nov 2013

This is an odd little film. Jason Statham plays Joey, a veteran with a bad case of combat stress who absconds from a medical hospital and winds up homeless on the streets of London. He’s separated from his only friend Isobel, when they’re roughed up by some thugs and somehow he ends up falling into the luxury apartment of an actor who’ll be out of town for eight months. Seizing on this opportunity, and posing as the actor’s boyfriend, he settles into the apartment, stealing cards and pin numbers, sprucing himself up, slapping on a suit and popping back onto the streets to score some drugs and find Isobel.

Unfortunately, Isobel has been taken by the thugs and sold into prostitution. Joey, unable to find his friend stumbles back to his old haunt, the soup kitchen in Soho and strikes up a relationship with the young nun who runs the place. It’s this relationship between Joey and Agata Buzek’s Sister Cristina that’s really at the core of the movie.  She encourages him to re-build his life, and he initially does, through the duality of being an underworld enforcer and something of a white night to London’s homeless.

Essentially that’s the issue with this film, it can’t decide if Joey is a good guy who does terrible things, or a bad guy who does good things. It also can’t decide if he’s a drug addled nutcase, a cold-hard killer or a kind-hearted but damaged romantic lead.  It seems to pick up ideas, run with them for a while and then discard them and pick up something else.  It’s difficult to settle into the rhythm of the film when it’s so disjointed.

The performances are however very good. It’s a much less showy role than we’re used to seeing from Statham and he does well to juggle the various aspects of this character, struggling to create a cohesive and believable man. He also has likeability on his side as does Buzek, whose Sister Cristina revels her horrible backstory, her reasons for becoming a nun and the truth at the core of her crisis of faith in one beautifully handled flashback.  It’s just very difficult to buy into their relationship being a romantic one. It doesn’t seem to serve any function to the plot and it would have been more believable for the story and truer to the characters had their relationship remained unconsummated.

Tonally the film is pretty bleak; although Joey gets a chance at redemption, ultimately he chooses to avenge his friend Isobel and the return to his life on the streets. He is a man who has given up completely on life, clutching a bottle of vodka, with his head in Sister Cristina’s lap explaining why he’s not worth saving.   This bleakness is echoed by the London on screen, a world away from the fairytale Richard Curtis London; this has an air of social realism to it, as the twilight of London’s underbelly is exposed.  Empty, lonely, cold and unforgiving….I guess like Joey.

Overall this film is a bit of a misfire.  You feel that it could have been excellent had the script been tweaked and some of the plot strands been either removed or beefed up – like Joey’s former partner and daughter.  They’re not in the film for long enough for the viewer to care about them, so either take them out completely or at least give them something to do. Even Isobel, the friend whose disappearance and murder Joey is compelled to avenge and therefore should be key in the story, is barely in it and the storyline itself is easily picked up and put down.  When the thing that excites you most about a film is that the running time is only 93 minutes, you know you’re not really onto a winner. One for hardcore Statham fans only.

Suzie King