The nun in red dress

Fuck, says Crazy Joey, as he sees a Polish nun in a red dress. It is his gift to her for saving whatever remains of his soul. She wears it to the photography exhibition where he has asked her to come. But the photographs leave her red-faced. ‘I didn’t realise they would be photographs of penises,’ he says by way of apology.

It’s a nice London evening. Good wine. Good people. And penises on the wall. Away from the mean streets of London where flesh and fetishes are on sale.  The two share a kiss. She breaks away from him and rushes home. Only to come back a few scenes later to finish the job. The Good Lord be damned.

They are both damaged goods. Crazy Joey (Statham) is running away from memories of an earlier life as a Royal Marine in Afghanistan where he killed a few innocents and permanently screwed his own sleep. He gets out of the forces, lands in London in the willing arms of the Chinese mafia looking for muscle on hire. 

Sister Cristina wants to be a ballerina, does gymnastics instead as the father wills. And then the instructor rapes her seventeen times. She slits his throat when he drops his pants for an eighteenth and becomes a nun. Then she meets Joey in squalor streets and mates at a posh pad he has broken into.

It’s a well-written film. Steven Knight wrote Eastern Promises before. He knows the bad bits of the big city. This is also Jason Statham’s big plea to critics to take him seriously. Incidentally, older muscle man Van Damme had also attempted ‘serious’ stuff with JCVD, a film where he plays himself, a washed-out superstar seeking sanity.

Hummingbird is not half bad. Knight could have done away with the mush though. Watch it if dark does it for you. Or else, go see Vidya Balan shake it without style in Ghanchakkar or whatever.