Hummingbird

Hummingbird is a 2013 movie with Jason Statham. In the US it was released with the alternative title Redemption. Statham plays Joey Jones an ex special forces soldier with a history. After his patrol is ambushed in Afghanistan and 5 of his comrades are killed he takes revenge by killing 5 random ‘suspects’. He deserts and hides from the army living on the streets of London. One night; on the run for drug criminals he ends up in an empty apartment by chance. He shaves and cleans himself up. Urged by a Catholic nun from the food shelter he used to frequent to do good he even finds a job in a Chinese restaurant. But because of his fighting skills he soon finds himself employed as a ‘chauffeur’ for the Chinese mob. Joey constantly struggles to keep his violent nature under control. In his words : ‘they sent me up a mountain to kill people, who do you expect came down that mountain ?’ Like in some other movies Statham is not playing a traditional hero here. Joey is quite a tragic figure, not heroic or virtuous at all, for whom a persons life has lost all value and the only ‘good’ thing about him is that most of the time he is only beating up and killing criminals. Still, there is not that much fighting going on most of the fight scenes are very short. Most of the time is going into the struggle of Joey with himself trying to live with his past and keep violence at bay. And Statham gets the chance to do a bit of acting besides fighting. Some interesting ideas are brought up in the movie but not enough is done with them in my opinion. Not bad, not very good either.