This story was originally published in 2018. Vulture is publishing it again to coincide with the release of Expend4bles, which sees Jason Statham reprising his role as a character with a truly deranged name that ranks appropriately high on this list.
The Meg pits Jason Statham against a giant prehistoric shark. It is a perfect movie. Sorry — almost a perfect movie. The only thing that can really be said against it is that it takes our preeminent bald action hero and deprives him of one of the hallmarks of his illustrious career: really deranged character names. Statham plays a rescue-op expert named Jonas Taylor — a goofy name in its own right, to be sure, but nothing close to his batshit monikers past.
You can’t blame The Meg for that name, as it’s based on a 1997 book that predates the movie that kicked off Statham’s run of weird character names by one year. And some of Statham’s key franchises admittedly saddle him with dull names unbefitting his glorious naming legacy: “Frank Martin” in the Transporter movies and “Arthur Bishop” for the Mechanic series. But, taken as a whole, only two actors can come close to the over-the-top, “real people aren’t named like this” buffoonery of Jason Statham’s filmography: Mark Wahlberg (Dirk Diggler, Cade Yeager, Dusty Mayron, Bob Lee Swagger) and Matthew McConaughey (Palmer Joss, Denton Van Zan, Dirk Pitt, Moondog).
“Statham’s a magnet for the absurd names,” says Crank and Crank: High Voltage co-writer/director Mark Neveldine. “It’s his look, his presence, his voice. He can truly pull it off.” The ability to infuse the most ridiculous possible situations with a brow-furrowed gravitas is what makes Statham work so well as an action star and, when required, a comedy MVP. Who can forget, “This arm has been ripped off completely and reattached with this fucking arm”?