Jason Statham tries to have his cake and eat it, too, in Steven Knight’s action drama with art-house pretensions that still allows the bullet-headed star to play the violent avenger and toss a bad guy off a roof during a fancy London party.
Statham is cast as a former Special Forces officer murkily blamed for botching a mission in Afghanistan, living on the Blighty streets a year after his discharge. At least until he “borrows” a wealthy businessman’s posh Covent Garden digs during the latter’s prolonged absence.
Our hero, who’s searching for his forced-into-prostitution girlfriend and at one point poses as a gay man, becomes romantically obsessed with an opera-loving nun (Polish actress Agata Buzek) he met while patronizing her soup kitchen. She accepts his donations, and his overtures, at least until she figures out Statham’s running drugs for the owners of a Chinese restaurant where he sometimes works.
Nothing in “Redemption” — receiving a token theatrical run coinciding with its US video-on-demand debut — quite adds up, including the paranoid hero’s insistence that he’s being watched by drones. But its nocturnal vision of London is lovely, thanks to cinematographer Chris Menges, a four-time Oscar nominee who won for “The Mission” and “The Killing Fields.”