Homefront is the best Jason Statham movie since The Transporter

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  Jason Statham has a movie where he plays a cop whose family is being chased by some bad guys.  He’s played this character so many times he’s running away with the title of modern day Charles Bronson.  However, his career is the boy who cried wolf of action films.  More often than not audiences have only paid attention when he’s part of an ensemble cast, like The Expendables. Jason Statham’s latest film on DVD, Homefront is nothing to cry wolf about, in fact it’s his best film since The Transporter.

Homefront…., I’ve never heard of that you say.  It was only in theaters for a couple weeks in November 2013 and is new to video now.  The plot sounds like a cliché of a previous Jason Statham movie.  A retired ex-undercover INTERPOL officer moves to a small town only to have his identity revealed and family threatened.  The plot is so familiar I was barely curious to see it.  We did however give away autographed merchandise from it.

In doing that research for the giveaway post my wife saw me watching the preview.  “I want to watch that”, she said.  Husbands know that when their wife says that they want to see a man cave movie to jump and move ASAP. “Let’s watch it on video”, I said, putting her off because I knew that Homefront was mostly going to suck.

Here I am eating crow.

Homefront is awesome.  Is it awesome because it’s a Jason Statham movie that isn’t horrible or because it’s actually a good movie? That is a question for you and your movie preferences to decide. We liked it for a combination of both reasons.  It certainly has a late 80s soul to it and could’ve easily been released in 1988 with Steven Segal.  And it’s also good to see Statham in a vehicle that has him doing something other than smirking and shooting, even though he does that a couple times in Homefront-and it was enjoyable.

The plot elements are standard, like the widowed father, daughter who struggling with grief, small towns and corrupt police.  However the pacing of the story, action and to an extent the plausibility of the story itself allows Homefront sail far above most action movies.

Things start to go wrong when Maddy Broker, daughter of Phil Broker (played by Statham), is being picked on by a bully at school.  She kicks his butt, girl power!, but the little bully’s mother is a meth head who is the sister of the local drug kingpin.  From here the movie goes into local vengeance, fights, a little plot development and a 30 minute finale that is better than it should be.