There’s something reassuringly dependable about the films of Jason Statham.
Whether the English actor is portraying a flawed but fundamentally decent man trying to protect a child while bringing down a drugs cartel, or a flawed and fundamentally bad man seeking redemption by trying to protect a child while bringing down a drugs cartel, Statham is utterly reliable.
No matter how wonky the script, the star – constructed out of a complicated arrangement of six-packs – carries the action with irresistible charm and good humour. No matter the odds against him, the Stath, as we aficionados know him, always gets the job done.
And, crucially, he frequently does so in just an hour and a half.
At 52, I have reached the stage in life where the first question I ask when someone recommends a movie is: “How long’s it?”
If I’m compelled to take my kids to the cinema to watch the latest, interminable instalment in the Star Wars or Avengers series, it is a certainty that I will fall asleep and humiliate them by snoring loudly until they jab me back to consciousness.
I scroll through every app looking for my next Stath fix. All the poster images seem to be the same – our hero looks tortured but tough – so, often, I’ll start one only to realise I watched it the week before. I’ll watch it again, obviously, because Statham has the likeable screen presence of any good movie star.
You may keep your three-part Peter Jackson fantasies, thank you very much. Give me, instead, the crisp 91 minutes of John Carpenter’s Halloween, or the sparkling 95 which Steve Martin uses for The Jerk.
I don’t want to endure long novels anymore
And it’s not just in films that I now seek brevity. My bookcases heave with epic novels, running to several hundred pages which a different, more easily swayed, version of me was once happy to endure.
You can have that copy of Catch-22 I’m never going to get round to
These days, I want the sub-200-page early books of crime writer George V Higgins, whose debut, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, can be consumed in a single sitting. Give me the short, dialogue-heavy novels of Elmore Leonard, which whip along at a ferocious rate, over the latest 400-plus page permutation of a crime novel about a girl in a particular location.
Let me keep the Muriel Spark books (her 22 novels contain only enough words to fill half a dozen current bestsellers) and you can have that copy of Catch-22 I’m never going to get round to.
Perhaps I’m losing the ability to concentrate as I get older but, these days, I find I want people to make their point as quickly as possible and then stop.
Euan McColm is a regular columnist for various Scottish newspapers
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