REVIEW - REDEMPTION

Redemption exists for no apparent reason other than to expand Jason Statham's repertoire, and cautiously at that. The film is like a paean to his arsenal of abilities on screen - gruff emoting and bone crunching, and most every scene features him indulging in one or the other of those. The gangster-does-bad-for-good's-sake storyline is as stale as they come, and it's tarted up with the standard inclusion of a love story between Statham's bad boy and a nun working at a soup kitchen. That's not a joke. She's a nun working at a soup kitchen. At first, he has no purpose being in a movie at all, until eventually a prostitute he knew (and who we barely get to know) goes missing. The romance is tiresome and gets lost among the various strands of plot which Steven Knight can't keep afloat, chief among them what's going on with poor old Isabel and what Joey's going to do about that. Homeless, he breaks into a plush apartment owned by a photographer, which has no alarm system, some very complaisant neighbours and a throng of sharply tailored garments that luckily fit Joey to a tee. There's enough story here to fill an entire short film, so most of the runtime is expended waiting for someone to say something of some significance / waiting for someone to say something at all. We await each narrative development with weariness, wondering why the characters didn't foresee it all as we did, and that Knight takes so long getting around to all of this is evidence of how stretched he was for good ideas. Jason Statham plays Jason Statham playing Jason Statham's idea of how Jason Statham ought to play a role already played by hundreds of other actors, just with added violence and humanity, and they're not exactly happy bedfellows. Dario Marianelli's score possibly took less time to write than this film does to watch, and Chris Menges' cinematography is blandly glossy in that 'trendy' neon so often used in London-set films these days, and it's so 2004!