Wit In Action

I did see The Bank Job – terrific movie; 111 minutes of story, story, story – and a few nights earlier (as it happened) I saw Crank, another film starring Jason Statham. In the former, he folds seamlessly into an ensemble of pretty decent actors; in the latter, he defies all of God’s laws without ever losing the facial expression of a man out for the morning paper. But the man knows what he’s doing: watch Crank and then suffer through as much as you can handle of Shoot ‘Em Up, two movies after exactly the same heart, and then tell me that wit doesn’t matter in action.

Here’s a prose example: Ross Thomas, in Missionary Stew, tackles a scene we all know by heart, saw nightly on television in the 1970s:

Replogle never finished the secondhand story because the big blue Dodge pickup honked and pulled up on the left. Haere looked over. There were two persons in the pickup. Both wore ski masks. The pickup and the station wagon had reached a sharp curve in the deep canyon. On the station wagon’s right, some fifty or sixty feet below, was a frozen creek.
The pickup swerved, and its right front fender slammed into the station wagon, which went into a skid on a patch of ice. Haere later thought they must have been counting on that – the ice. Replogle did everything he was supposed to do. He kept his foot off the brake. He steered into the skid. He swore.
The station wagon plunged over the side. On either the first or second roll the right-hand door popped open and Draper Haere popped out. He landed in a snowbank. The station wagon somersaulted two more times, end over end, and smashed against some immense boulders at the creek’s edge. Two seconds later the gas tank exploded.
Haere got up and made himself stumble through the snow down to the burning car. He tried to open its front left door, but it was either jammed or locked. Haere burned his hands trying to get the door open. He finally could stand neither the heat nor the pain, so he moved backward, tripped over something, and sat back down in a snowbank. He jammed his scorched hands down deep into the snow and sat there watching Jack Replogle burn to death if, indeed, he wasn’t already dead. In either event, there was nothing Draper Haere could do about it.

I love the thin joke of “everything he was supposed to do…He swore” and the intrusive reality of “made himself stumble…to the burning car” and the rueful “In either event”.

It’s unfair to stand most writers next to Thomas, and especially the sophomore effort of a writer whose first book was pretty damn good, but here’s Marcus Sakey, in At The City’s Edge, with another familiar scene: a couple of heavies are trying to take our man for a ride:

Then, for the first time, Soul Patch made a mistake. He stood still.
It was as much of a window as Jason could hope for. Continuing his forward motion, he stepped into Soul Patch like they were dancing, right hand closing on the guy’s wrist to lock the gun in place. But instead of grappling for the weapon, he spun, planting his back against the man’s chest, the gun arm now in front of both of them. The wrestler startled awake with a snort. Soul Patch gave a surprised yelp, struggled to free his hand. Jason continued his spin, remembering this fucker talking about Michael, threatening his brother. He yanked, and as he felt the man come off balance, he kept turning, transforming the fall into a throw that hurled the gangbanger against the half-closed car door. It flew open and slammed into the wrestler, the frame catching him square in the face with a meaty thump. The double impact knocked the wind out of Soul Patch, and the gun clattered from his hand.
The moment it did, Jason shoved away. Two awkward steps and he had his balance. His heart screamed to run, but his head was cool. They were enemy combatants. He didn’t want to leave them armed. The grip of the pistol was warm and slightly sweaty as he snatched it from the concrete.
Then he took off in a sprint, knowing that he hadn’t incapacitated either man. His legs pumped clean and strong. He crossed the open asphalt to the next row, then planted his left foot and lunged behind a car. A window exploded with a sharp crack. All the old energy came back. He jerked to the side again and broke from the row, then poured it on in a straightaway to the boundary of the lot. Leapt for the concrete abutment, planted one foot, and sprang off the second-story parking deck.
In the endless instant he floated through the air, Jason Palmer realized he was smiling.

Really? Well, we do live in a new century. (Each of these passages is the first blast of violence in the book. Thomas’s comes on page 44 or so, Sakey’s on page 6 or 7.) But with the author and the author’s sentences and the author’s hero all so jacked up, I feel like they’re getting excited for me, and there’s nothing left for me to do. I’ll just be sitting over here, with my hands in the snowbank.