Hummingbird | Redemption (2013)
Jul. 6th, 2022 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleI have been on a Jason Statham movie kick (not for any real reason, just because), and I've been watching my way through all the nonsense he's been in that's on the various streaming services I have access to.
I watched this on Sunday (Hummingbird is the original title; it was released in the US as Redemption, although the title card on both the trailer and the movie itself say Hummingbird, and I've used AO3's piped tag to get both of them in), and then again yesterday because I couldn't stop thinking about it and I didn't pay enough attention to the details the first time around to be able to write about it. Also, it's one of those movies where the Netflix one-sentence summary ("Traumatized by the Afghanistan war, an ex-Special Forces soldier goes to London, where his tenuous new life is derailed by the criminal underground.") doesn't even begin to cover it.
Content notes: all kinds of violence, people trafficking, past sexual assaults, literal war crimes.
Plot Summary
We start with drone footage in Kandahar where there's been an attack on a military vehicle, and Joey Smith (Jason Statham) starts marching a guy down the street while shooting his gun in the air. On second rewatch, the original title of the movie made more sense - the drone that follows him is called "Hummingbird" and he also sees hummingbird hallucinations as part of some of the flashbacks to this incident we see, each time with more details.
Then we switch to London a year later, February. Joey is living on the street, having escaped military custody and evaded a court martial. A guy who goes by Taxman comes by to demand everyone's money/drugs. Isabelle, a young woman Joey knows, tells him not to fight back, but of course he does. Joey escapes and falls into an empty apartment - I think it's supposed to be a converted warehouse. He drinks some of the alcohol he finds in the apartment, cleans himself up, and takes some clothes. Then he finds out from the answering machine that the owner, Damon, is in New York until October 1, so Joey takes over the apartment, including finding a bank card in Damon's mail that he uses to get some money.
Then he goes looking for Isabel, starting at the outdoor soup kitchen run by Sister Cristina, a Polish nun. He gives her the money he took from Damon's account and tells her to buy something nice for herself. She takes it to the mother superior, but also says that there's something she's been praying for, so the mother superior tells her if it's an answer to a prayer, then it can be used for that and she hasn't written anything down yet. Cristina uses it to buy a box - the last available seats - for a ballerina's farewell performance on October 1.
Joey uses Damon's apartment as a home base. He goes to Cristina for antibiotics for an infection around his broken ribs, and she tells him they won't work if he drinks, so he gets sober. He puts up flyers and asks around for anyone who's seen Isabel to contact him at Damon's number/flat. She calls and leaves a message that she's working for some villains just for a little while until she can afford a deposit. We see her in what is obviously a prostitution situation.
Joey starts taking better care of himself, lies to the neighbors that he's one of Damon's boyfriends who models sometimes, and gets a job at in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. Then the restaurant people ask him to deal with some rowdy white dudes and he's skillfully violent enough that he gets recruited to work for some variety of Chinese mafia. He works for them and stashes most of his money away in cash, while also still keeping an ear out for Isabel. He uses some of the movie to do things like send dozens of pizzas to Cristina's food distribution so the people coming to eat can have other food. He also waits outside his daughter's school so he can surreptitiously see his ex and his daughter and then runs into his ex at a store and gives her money.
He sends Cristina a dress and invites her to visit him where he has a barbecue set up on the street while he's killing time. She tells him she's not going to keep the dress. She brings him pictures of a dead girl who was found in the river. He recognizes the dead girl as Isabel and literally flips the table. They argue, and then she puts her hand over his and confesses that she used the money he gave her for something for herself but hasn't been able to sleep since, so she had her sister sell some of the things she left behind and returns the money to him. He insists she take the dress. She protests that she's a nun, and he tells her, "I used to wear a uniform. Don't mean a thing. You just take it off."
Later, he sends Cristina an invitation to a gallery opening and asks her to meet him there so he can tell her what he's learned about Isabel's murderer to pass on to her police liaison. She entirely ditches her habit and shows up in the dress he gave her. She drinks, but hasn't eaten anything so she gets a little drunk, tells him that she's "having a crazy patch," and they kiss.
He helps her load things into the van after she's done feeding people on day, and gets in the van with her. She tells him, "It not my fault that I'm fucked up." He asks her, "So whose fault is it?" After a long moment of silence, she says, "He was my gymnastics instructor." Joey's as surprised as the audience is. Cristina tells him that she wanted to be a ballerina but her father wouldn't let her and she had to take gymnastics. The instructor sexually abused her beginning when she was 10, and he did it 17 times. It was supposed to be the 18th, but she - and we see this part in a flashback instead of hearing her tell the story - had a knife and cut his throat. Because she was so young, instead of being sent to prison, she was sent to a convent. If she'd done ballet, she says, it never would have happened. She also says she's never told anyone before. Joey asks, "Want me to drive?" She says, "I want someone to drive," and he drives the van the rest of the way for her. Before he gets out, he says, "Cristina, in the end, I just took off my uniform and ran."
Joey does a job for the Chinese mafia that no one wants to do, which involves people being trafficked in boxes in the back of a truck, in exchange for the name of the guy who killed Isabel: 30ish, scar over his eye, works in the City - and who will be at a rooftop party on October 1.
Joey asks Cristina to meet him in a park on October 1 to take some pictures of him. He wants some pictures where he looks normal to give to his daughter. Cristina applied to go to a mission in Africa that she always planned to go to in a few years, but she's pushed it up. She tells Joey about it when they have coffee after the photos in the park, just before she's going to leave, and says she wants to spend the last day with him. They go to Damon's apartment and have (off-screen) sex.
They run down the fire escape as Damon comes in the front door. On the street, he says, "There's enough money in here to get us away. We can go anywhere in the world." She refuses, but asks him to come with her to the ballet. Joey takes a bag of money and the photos to his ex and daughter.
We see Joey in a tux while Cristina's waiting outside the ballet. She goes to the ballet and becomes absolutely enthralled by the dancing; he goes to the rooftop bar where he throws the guy who killed Isabel off the roof and then starts shooting into the air so no one will stop him from leaving.
Cristina comes out of the ballet to find Joey lying on the edge of the sidewalk, drunk. She tells him that she's waiting to see the ballerina walk to her car. He tells her that when he's sober, he hurts people. "I drink to weaken the machine they made." He confesses his war crime to her, that the attack killed five of his people, so he went and killed the first five people he could find. Cristina watches the ballerina walk to her car and says, "She's my witness." He puts his head in her lap and she wraps her arm around him.
Cristina gets an envelope just as she gets into a cab to the airport. She opens it as the cab drives away and finds the other pictures she took of Joey and a letter where he says he returned Damon's money plus extra for rent, left money for the people at the homeless mission for pizzas, and sent the people smugglers' details to the police. He says, "I was alive again for one summer. I'm glad I spent it with you." Cristina's drive is intercut with Joey walking down the street drinking. Then we get mixed radio chatter and CCTV footage of the police narrowing in on Joey. And then it cuts to the credits.
Thoughts and Plot Bunnies
When I finished watching it the first time, I tweeted, "Sometimes you watch a Jason Statham movie and it's exactly what you expect and sometimes you watch a Jason Statham movie and it's some of what you expect and also he has a love affair with a nun." I couldn't stop thinking about it because it's such a weird combination of things!
I probably also couldn't stop thinking about it because I don't think the movie has any kind of coherent idea or worldview. Are we supposed to think that Joey providing for his daughter, taking revenge for Isabel's murder, returning Damon's money, and giving the police information on the Chinese mafia make up for the literal war crime he committed in Afghanistan and the violence he's committed along the way? Is this movie really about Cristina? Does the movie think she needs to repent for having killed her abuser? Does Cristina even believe in being a nun for God-related reasons? Does she believe in being a nun and doing missionary/charity work for any reason other than she thinks she has to do something good to make up for killing someone? I have no answers to these questions, and I'm not sure the movie has any idea what it thinks about any of it either.
I think the movie thinks Joey and Cristina are foils for each other, but, again, doing good because you think you have to make amends for killing your abuser and giving people money to make up for committing a literal war crime of your own volition are not moral equivalents. It's weird to pretend they are! I'm also unclear on whether or not the movie thinks it's saying something about the contrasting way that the powerful institutions they joined - willingly or not - shaped them: the military made Joey skilled in violence and the Church taught Cristina that she needs to do good. I'm almost positive the movie has no idea that it had an opportunity it didn't take to comment on the colonialist similarities between the British military and the Catholic Church. Joey was in Afghanistan; Cristina goes to Africa. You can't get much more white savior colonialist than that. Possibly this looked different when the movie came out in 2013 than it does now in 2022.
All of that said, there are two scenes I thought were really excellently done. The first is the scene where Cristina tells Joey about her history of sexual abuse. He goes quiet and attentive when she starts to tell him, and her part is filled with silences where the camera stays on her and lets her work her way into telling him. I absolutely loved that he asks if she wants him to drive. He's not trying to deny what she said or even really comfort her. He gives her space to say what she needs to say, and he offers what he can give her in that moment. And I loved that she says she wants someone to drive. It's an answer to his question, but you can also see why the Church appeals to her: someone else is in charge and she doesn't have to figure out things herself.
The second is the off-screen sex scene. Cristina says she wants to spend her last day in London with him when they're at a cafe, and then we cut to a very, very slow pan across Damon's apartment. We see clothing and keys draped across the room, two pairs of shoes on the floor, and the barest sliver of the bed visible through the cracked door of the bedroom. We don't even hear the sex scene; it's left entirely private, entirely between the two of them. It cuts to Damon getting out of a cab and coming up to the door, and then next thing we get from Joey and Cristina is Cristina's laugh, Cristina drinking some wine as Damon yells at them through the door open only as far as the chain will let it, and then Joey and Cristina holding hands as they race down the fire escape. It's so respectful of Cristina and of their relationship. That and the moment afterward where they kiss tenderly in the street are also so good because they're gentle and happy. Joey may hurt people, and he may have flipped a table and yelled at her in a frightening way, but there isn't even the slightest hint of violence around the two of them having sex. I liked that a lot.
Overall, I wouldn't say this is a good movie, but also I watched it twice and can totally see myself watching it again. I have also added it to my potential Yuletide nominations/requests list. Some things I would read about:
I watched this on Sunday (Hummingbird is the original title; it was released in the US as Redemption, although the title card on both the trailer and the movie itself say Hummingbird, and I've used AO3's piped tag to get both of them in), and then again yesterday because I couldn't stop thinking about it and I didn't pay enough attention to the details the first time around to be able to write about it. Also, it's one of those movies where the Netflix one-sentence summary ("Traumatized by the Afghanistan war, an ex-Special Forces soldier goes to London, where his tenuous new life is derailed by the criminal underground.") doesn't even begin to cover it.
Content notes: all kinds of violence, people trafficking, past sexual assaults, literal war crimes.
Plot Summary
We start with drone footage in Kandahar where there's been an attack on a military vehicle, and Joey Smith (Jason Statham) starts marching a guy down the street while shooting his gun in the air. On second rewatch, the original title of the movie made more sense - the drone that follows him is called "Hummingbird" and he also sees hummingbird hallucinations as part of some of the flashbacks to this incident we see, each time with more details.
Then we switch to London a year later, February. Joey is living on the street, having escaped military custody and evaded a court martial. A guy who goes by Taxman comes by to demand everyone's money/drugs. Isabelle, a young woman Joey knows, tells him not to fight back, but of course he does. Joey escapes and falls into an empty apartment - I think it's supposed to be a converted warehouse. He drinks some of the alcohol he finds in the apartment, cleans himself up, and takes some clothes. Then he finds out from the answering machine that the owner, Damon, is in New York until October 1, so Joey takes over the apartment, including finding a bank card in Damon's mail that he uses to get some money.
Then he goes looking for Isabel, starting at the outdoor soup kitchen run by Sister Cristina, a Polish nun. He gives her the money he took from Damon's account and tells her to buy something nice for herself. She takes it to the mother superior, but also says that there's something she's been praying for, so the mother superior tells her if it's an answer to a prayer, then it can be used for that and she hasn't written anything down yet. Cristina uses it to buy a box - the last available seats - for a ballerina's farewell performance on October 1.
Joey uses Damon's apartment as a home base. He goes to Cristina for antibiotics for an infection around his broken ribs, and she tells him they won't work if he drinks, so he gets sober. He puts up flyers and asks around for anyone who's seen Isabel to contact him at Damon's number/flat. She calls and leaves a message that she's working for some villains just for a little while until she can afford a deposit. We see her in what is obviously a prostitution situation.
Joey starts taking better care of himself, lies to the neighbors that he's one of Damon's boyfriends who models sometimes, and gets a job at in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. Then the restaurant people ask him to deal with some rowdy white dudes and he's skillfully violent enough that he gets recruited to work for some variety of Chinese mafia. He works for them and stashes most of his money away in cash, while also still keeping an ear out for Isabel. He uses some of the movie to do things like send dozens of pizzas to Cristina's food distribution so the people coming to eat can have other food. He also waits outside his daughter's school so he can surreptitiously see his ex and his daughter and then runs into his ex at a store and gives her money.
He sends Cristina a dress and invites her to visit him where he has a barbecue set up on the street while he's killing time. She tells him she's not going to keep the dress. She brings him pictures of a dead girl who was found in the river. He recognizes the dead girl as Isabel and literally flips the table. They argue, and then she puts her hand over his and confesses that she used the money he gave her for something for herself but hasn't been able to sleep since, so she had her sister sell some of the things she left behind and returns the money to him. He insists she take the dress. She protests that she's a nun, and he tells her, "I used to wear a uniform. Don't mean a thing. You just take it off."
Later, he sends Cristina an invitation to a gallery opening and asks her to meet him there so he can tell her what he's learned about Isabel's murderer to pass on to her police liaison. She entirely ditches her habit and shows up in the dress he gave her. She drinks, but hasn't eaten anything so she gets a little drunk, tells him that she's "having a crazy patch," and they kiss.
He helps her load things into the van after she's done feeding people on day, and gets in the van with her. She tells him, "It not my fault that I'm fucked up." He asks her, "So whose fault is it?" After a long moment of silence, she says, "He was my gymnastics instructor." Joey's as surprised as the audience is. Cristina tells him that she wanted to be a ballerina but her father wouldn't let her and she had to take gymnastics. The instructor sexually abused her beginning when she was 10, and he did it 17 times. It was supposed to be the 18th, but she - and we see this part in a flashback instead of hearing her tell the story - had a knife and cut his throat. Because she was so young, instead of being sent to prison, she was sent to a convent. If she'd done ballet, she says, it never would have happened. She also says she's never told anyone before. Joey asks, "Want me to drive?" She says, "I want someone to drive," and he drives the van the rest of the way for her. Before he gets out, he says, "Cristina, in the end, I just took off my uniform and ran."
Joey does a job for the Chinese mafia that no one wants to do, which involves people being trafficked in boxes in the back of a truck, in exchange for the name of the guy who killed Isabel: 30ish, scar over his eye, works in the City - and who will be at a rooftop party on October 1.
Joey asks Cristina to meet him in a park on October 1 to take some pictures of him. He wants some pictures where he looks normal to give to his daughter. Cristina applied to go to a mission in Africa that she always planned to go to in a few years, but she's pushed it up. She tells Joey about it when they have coffee after the photos in the park, just before she's going to leave, and says she wants to spend the last day with him. They go to Damon's apartment and have (off-screen) sex.
They run down the fire escape as Damon comes in the front door. On the street, he says, "There's enough money in here to get us away. We can go anywhere in the world." She refuses, but asks him to come with her to the ballet. Joey takes a bag of money and the photos to his ex and daughter.
We see Joey in a tux while Cristina's waiting outside the ballet. She goes to the ballet and becomes absolutely enthralled by the dancing; he goes to the rooftop bar where he throws the guy who killed Isabel off the roof and then starts shooting into the air so no one will stop him from leaving.
Cristina comes out of the ballet to find Joey lying on the edge of the sidewalk, drunk. She tells him that she's waiting to see the ballerina walk to her car. He tells her that when he's sober, he hurts people. "I drink to weaken the machine they made." He confesses his war crime to her, that the attack killed five of his people, so he went and killed the first five people he could find. Cristina watches the ballerina walk to her car and says, "She's my witness." He puts his head in her lap and she wraps her arm around him.
Cristina gets an envelope just as she gets into a cab to the airport. She opens it as the cab drives away and finds the other pictures she took of Joey and a letter where he says he returned Damon's money plus extra for rent, left money for the people at the homeless mission for pizzas, and sent the people smugglers' details to the police. He says, "I was alive again for one summer. I'm glad I spent it with you." Cristina's drive is intercut with Joey walking down the street drinking. Then we get mixed radio chatter and CCTV footage of the police narrowing in on Joey. And then it cuts to the credits.
Thoughts and Plot Bunnies
When I finished watching it the first time, I tweeted, "Sometimes you watch a Jason Statham movie and it's exactly what you expect and sometimes you watch a Jason Statham movie and it's some of what you expect and also he has a love affair with a nun." I couldn't stop thinking about it because it's such a weird combination of things!
I probably also couldn't stop thinking about it because I don't think the movie has any kind of coherent idea or worldview. Are we supposed to think that Joey providing for his daughter, taking revenge for Isabel's murder, returning Damon's money, and giving the police information on the Chinese mafia make up for the literal war crime he committed in Afghanistan and the violence he's committed along the way? Is this movie really about Cristina? Does the movie think she needs to repent for having killed her abuser? Does Cristina even believe in being a nun for God-related reasons? Does she believe in being a nun and doing missionary/charity work for any reason other than she thinks she has to do something good to make up for killing someone? I have no answers to these questions, and I'm not sure the movie has any idea what it thinks about any of it either.
I think the movie thinks Joey and Cristina are foils for each other, but, again, doing good because you think you have to make amends for killing your abuser and giving people money to make up for committing a literal war crime of your own volition are not moral equivalents. It's weird to pretend they are! I'm also unclear on whether or not the movie thinks it's saying something about the contrasting way that the powerful institutions they joined - willingly or not - shaped them: the military made Joey skilled in violence and the Church taught Cristina that she needs to do good. I'm almost positive the movie has no idea that it had an opportunity it didn't take to comment on the colonialist similarities between the British military and the Catholic Church. Joey was in Afghanistan; Cristina goes to Africa. You can't get much more white savior colonialist than that. Possibly this looked different when the movie came out in 2013 than it does now in 2022.
All of that said, there are two scenes I thought were really excellently done. The first is the scene where Cristina tells Joey about her history of sexual abuse. He goes quiet and attentive when she starts to tell him, and her part is filled with silences where the camera stays on her and lets her work her way into telling him. I absolutely loved that he asks if she wants him to drive. He's not trying to deny what she said or even really comfort her. He gives her space to say what she needs to say, and he offers what he can give her in that moment. And I loved that she says she wants someone to drive. It's an answer to his question, but you can also see why the Church appeals to her: someone else is in charge and she doesn't have to figure out things herself.
The second is the off-screen sex scene. Cristina says she wants to spend her last day in London with him when they're at a cafe, and then we cut to a very, very slow pan across Damon's apartment. We see clothing and keys draped across the room, two pairs of shoes on the floor, and the barest sliver of the bed visible through the cracked door of the bedroom. We don't even hear the sex scene; it's left entirely private, entirely between the two of them. It cuts to Damon getting out of a cab and coming up to the door, and then next thing we get from Joey and Cristina is Cristina's laugh, Cristina drinking some wine as Damon yells at them through the door open only as far as the chain will let it, and then Joey and Cristina holding hands as they race down the fire escape. It's so respectful of Cristina and of their relationship. That and the moment afterward where they kiss tenderly in the street are also so good because they're gentle and happy. Joey may hurt people, and he may have flipped a table and yelled at her in a frightening way, but there isn't even the slightest hint of violence around the two of them having sex. I liked that a lot.
Overall, I wouldn't say this is a good movie, but also I watched it twice and can totally see myself watching it again. I have also added it to my potential Yuletide nominations/requests list. Some things I would read about:
- Does Cristina go to Sierra Leone? Does she stay a nun or does she, on the way to the airport or at some other point, just take the uniform off and walk away or otherwise stop being a nun?
- I would 100% read any number of stories where the result of their last day together is Cristina getting pregnant. (I know this is a cliche. I don't care.) I would read about her finding out in Sierra Leone and having to decide what to do. I would read about the Church sending her somewhere to have the baby. (What does the Church do about pregnant nuns?) I would read about the Church sending her somewhere to have the baby to surrender it for adoption and her deciding that that's the time to take off her uniform and walk away. I would read about her never telling Joey, about her thinking she has to tell Joey, about her trying to tell Joey and failing. I would read about her ending up in some sort of roommate situation with Joey's ex where they help each other raise their children. I would read what she tells her child about Joey.
- What was that sex like? They were very happy and tender together on the street afterwards, so obviously it was good. Was it a revelation to Cristina the way her body could feel? Was Joey very careful with her? Was it a healing experience for her? Does she live the rest of her life as a nun knowing what she's given up and consciously continuing to make that choice?
- I'm not sure if I would read a canon divergence story where they run away together, but maybe? Maybe one where Joey splits the money so half of it goes to his ex and daughter and the other half is for him and Cristina to take off their uniforms and walk away. What does that do to her and to him? Can he find a way to be healthy and not hurt people? Can she find a way to do something meaningful without the Church structure?
- Joey tells Cristina at one point that he's Catholic. I would read a story where Ruby, his daughter, becomes a nun and ends up somewhere working with Cristina. I think that would be an interesting thing to explore, and I would be super into it if neither of them know about their connection until somehow it comes out, possibly because Ruby sees one of the pictures Cristina has kept and asks her, "Why do you have pictures of my dad?"