Jason Statham’s most recent film, The Beekeeper, is a textbook classic of the form. What form is that? You need only have seen one premium example to know the drill: it’s a revenge thriller in which Jason Statham gets angry, speaks sparingly, and litters the screen with the corpses of anyone foolish enough to take him on.

In this instance, those Stath sights are set on a cyber-fraud cartel which has been scamming old ladies out of their pensions – the kind of incontestable carte blanche for a Statham rage spree that has padded the wallets of screenwriters since the moment he became a viable action star.

His precise modus operandi does fluctuate from role to role. Amid scenes of finger severing and squishing S.W.A.T. teams down lift shafts, David Ayer’s delightfully absurd film is the only outing to date in which Statham has knowingly incapacitated a deadly opponent by flinging a jar of honey at her head, then calmly setting alight to her drenched body. Hang on – honey burns?! Only the pure stuff, apparently.

The Beekeeper, for Statham fans, is a big hit of the pure stuff. “Who the f— are you, Winnie the Pooh?” asks an FBI agent, a wonderful line for cutting to Statham’s unamused face as he calmly responds, “I keep bees.” He is quite literally a beekeeper, and also one in a secret-agent-coded sense, ex special forces, who has signed a blood oath to “protect the hive” – a concept that never becomes comprehensible, no matter how many times the bozo script by Kurt (Equilibrium) Wimmer trots it out.

Somehow, this mad cocktail of bee trivia and indiscriminate slaughter is weird enough to work. It certainly worked at the box office. Before the current supremacy of Dune: Part Two, The Beekeeper managed to claim the top spot as the No. 1 hit of 2024 so far, netting over $150m worldwide – a figure that surprised analysts, given that the film came out with minimal buzz (sorry) in the second week of January.

Statham commanded a whopping $25m salary for making it, which he was in a position to get because of a banner 2023, in which he starred in Fast X, Expend4bles, and Meg 2: The Trench, raking in similar amounts for each (even if Expend4bles, through no fault of his, flopped dismally, and Fast X underperformed). As a result of all this, he has cracked the Forbes top 10 for Hollywood’s highest-earning actors of 2023. His $42m haul is a little below the likes of Margot Robbie or Tom Cruise, but above Denzel Washington and Ben Affleck.

The legs on the 56-year-old’s action career have by now easily outlasted the Bruce Willis model for bald butt-kicking. How has he done it?

Along with avoiding the smirking air of smugness which made us tire of Willis over the long haul, the hair is an integral part of it. Statham’s stubbled pate is vital to his appeal, so fixed an aspect of his now-unsinkable brand that his characters accessorise at their peril.

Once or twice – see Hummingbird (2013) and Homefront (2013) – a straggly hairpiece has been sported at the beginning of the film. If these vehicles understand their star in the slightest, they must abide by the eternal law of Statham’s Wig, which is an exact inverse of Chekhov’s Gun. After the first act, it must vanish and never be seen again, ideally shorn in a slow-motion clipper montage to show him cleaning up his act.

There are films that broke this law, and these are heresies – among Statham’s worst ever. Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (2005) has many, many ideas above its ludicrous station, but the lank, black hairpiece atop its leading man is somehow an instant totem of its pretentiousness. It’s just wrong.

Absolutely no one, meanwhile, has seen Statham’s contribution to the low-budget US indie London (also 2005 – not a good year), but a Google Image check is possible on the Willis-in-Sixth-Sense-toupee-manquée involved, and it explains more or less everything.

Though Statham’s recruitment into the Fast & Furious saga in 2013 netted him easily his biggest box office paydays, he has racked up a good couple of dozen profitable films in his time – generally by keeping the overheads low and the formula basic. He’s disciplined, knows his brand, and has a simmering, low-key star power which makes it easy to underrate him: exports from Sydenham, south east London, or indeed Great Britain, have rarely made it so big.

By now, Statham and his management are aware that his stardom depends on keeping certain things robust and simple. To this end, his film titles contain as few words as possible, ideally just the one. (He actually made one called The One. It’s awful.)

As The Meg further demonstrates, he’s down with definite pronouns. But you’ll never catch him in An Anything or Being Anything or any of that nonsense.

He favours jobs: The Transporter (2002). The Mechanic (2011). The Bank Job (2008). Spy (2015). (And somehow, The Beekeeper now, too.) His men of action have sellable skills, and advertise them with the bare minimum of fuss or verbiage. Rather like the star himself.

Statham doesn’t much like doing interviews, but once in a while a film needs his help – the underseen Hummingbird was one such, neo-gumshoe drama Parker (2013) another. During these brief promotional interludes, he comes out and explains himself, revealing a career plan guided, as much as anything, by common sense. “You can’t have a sushi restaurant and then put cheese on toast on the menu,” he told the Guardian in 2013.

In his own films, the reverse is doubtless true, but he meant this to excuse his absence from work by rarefied auteurs. Take Todd Haynes: you wouldn’t catch Statham dead in a film called Carol, Velvet Goldmine, or I’m Not There. He is always very much There. (His 2012 Safe is not a remake.)

Since his first dreams of being a stuntman, Statham has knuckled down to the physical side of his job with uncomplaining graft, and loves learning new tricks. He dropped his body fat to an amazing 6 per cent to get fit for Death Race (2008). Before he was an actor, he reached a peak, trivia fans, as the world’s 12th best diver, only to have his Olympics hopes dashed in the early 1990s.

And there remains a bucket list, as he once told Men’s Journal. “There’s one thing that I’ve never tried to do and that’s fly one of those wing [suits] […] off a cliff and do that proximity flying where they take a layer of skin off their chin by flying close to the rocks.” While some of us dust off Anthony Trollope, he’ll get on with this.