The Stathe plays Joey, an ex-army soldier who is now living on the streets of London destitute with his friend Isobel after absconding from the army following some kind of terrible incident in Afghanistan. After a short encounter with a couple of hoodlums on the street that result in Isobel being murdered, Joey stumbles into the house of a man who is out of the country for the best part of a year. Joey decides to steal his money, clothes and identity and uses them to be a different man, using his army training as a hard-case enforcer for a Chinese human trafficker in London's underground crime network. Hardly becoming a new man is it? But anyway, Joey befriends a young Polish nun Christina who is working in a food kitchen. He gives most of his money to them, but what he really wants is to take revenge against the people who killed Isobel. Will he get his revenge on the London criminal underclass? Or will Christina's kind heart convince him to get his revenge in a roundabout way, by helping London's street-sleepers like she does?
It's fairly derivative stuff that isn't told that well. It presents a picture of homelessness on London's streets and post-traumatic stress in the army without really offering any ideas or solutions, rather they're an excuse to give The Stathe some crims to punch. The opening half hour of the film is slow-burning but largely wasted, presenting us with Joey's character and hardly telling us anything about him. Scene to scene we swing between The Stathe doing his hard man thing and crying his heart out at the humanity of it all. It's all a tiny bit forced, as if these scenes had different writers who weren't paying enough attention to the overall arc of the film.
To be fair to Hummingbird, I've seen plenty of action movies that have a lot less heart than this. Most Jason Statham movies fit into that category quite easily. What Hummingbird tries to do is give you a bit of everything, but although it's sort of ok it's never really that good at any of it. I think the film wants The Stathe's character to be sympathetic, but at the end of the film when you find out what happened in Afghanistan it kind of makes that impossible. The film wants to be about redemption, but there isn't really any redemption and the use of a nun as a character who instigates that redemption is a bit too literal for my tastes. The film also wants to say something about how people can change, but that gets mishandled towards the end too when it turns out The Stathe hasn't really changed at all. Oddest of all is the character of Christina, who reveals a history of abuse at the hands of an overpowering man - yet for some reason opens up to The Stathe, yet another alpha male who's throwing ill-gotten money around. Perhaps the idea is that she's also being redeemed from her self-imposed chastity as a nun by seeing men as people rather than beasts. But given Joey's character I'm not really convinced that's too realistic.
Maybe I'm reading a little too much into the symbolism of this, after all Jason Statham films are supposed to be about The Stathe rushing around hitting things. But Hummingbird is clearly trying to be something more than the average Jason Statham film so I'm going to give it a little more thought than some of his other films warrant. Hummingbird is a good watch, but tries too hard and too unsuccessfully to be a lot more than it is. If you were a fan of The Stathe then you should definitely check this out to see what he's doing with his career. If you're not a fan of his, then you need to get off your high horse and check out Crank - I dare you to tell me it's not so silly it's awesome.
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