A Working Man is a perfect title for a Jason Statham movie, since regardless of the vehicle, the action star has made his name playing no-frills, no-nonsense bada--es. He’s in familiar terrain with this, his second straight collaboration with director David Ayer following last year’s anti-phishing scammer The Beekeeper, which has him targeting another class of scum-of-the-Earth criminal: human traffickers.
With a grimace perpetually affixed to his stubbly mug, and a set of skills that would make Liam Neeson’s Taken and Keanu Reeves’ John Wick killers proud, he ends lives with extreme head-bashing, limb-snapping prejudice. With a minimum of wit and a surplus of sadistic violence, he’s an archetypal vigilante who serves as judge, jury, and executioner for anyone who dares cross him.
In theaters Mar. 28, A Working Man is based on the novel Levon’s Trade by Chuck Dixon, a comic-book writer famed for his takes on The Punisher and Batman, and co-written by Sylvester Stallone. The film initially locates Levon Cade (Statham) at a construction site, where he works for company owners Joe (Michael Peña) and Carla (Noemi Gonzalez) Garcia.
Levon lives in his pick-up truck and is such a rousing leader that everyone brings him lunch, including Joe and Carla’s daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas), who likes Levon and who’s planning on going out with friends on her dad’s dime to celebrate the completion of the college semester. Levon tells Jenny that he has her back, and his support is put to the test when, that night, she’s snatched from a watering hole by siblings Viper (Emmet J. Scanlan) and Artemis (Eva Mauro), who were tracking her with the aid of the establishment’s drug-dealing bartender Johnny (David Witts).
Levon is a widower who’s currently embroiled in a custody battle over his daughter Merry (Isla Gie) with his former father-in-law Dr. Roth (Richard Heap)—a state of affairs designed to underline Levon’s dogged paternal instincts. Because Levon considers the Garcias “family,” he agrees to find Jenny, and fortunately, he’s more than up to the task, given that in his prior life, he was a decorated Royal Marine.
After visiting his blind war buddy Gunny (David Harbour), whose hide he saved and who now resides in a cabin in the woods, Levon begins tracking down the girl. This involves confronting and waterboarding Johnny, and when that torture session is interrupted by the arrival of two Russian hoods, Levon blows them away without giving it a second thought and then borrows $90k from the apartment. Shortly thereafter, he tracks down the gunmen’s employer Wolo (Jason Flemyng), who’s surprised to learn that Levon didn’t care about the money (he returns it) and is really in search of Jenny.
Before Levon drowns Wolo in his indoor pool, the gangster utters the name Dimi (Maximilian Osinski), who turns out to be the mischievous black sheep of the mafia brotherhood to which these Russians belong. Levon thus turns his attention to this individual, and to earn a meeting with him, he concocts a scheme in which he convinces a towering biker-gang drug dealer named Dutch (Chidi Ajufo)—who sits on a throne made from motorcycle exhausts—to let him deal some of his product. Before Dutch agrees to this arrangement, he has Levon fight his cadre of muscular underlings, and Ayer makes sure to stage that mayhem with maximum gung-ho brutality.
A Working Man is a macho fantasy about a dad acting out his daughter-saving fantasy by rescuing a surrogate child, with Statham talking tough and acting tougher in typically forthright fashion. The actor doesn’t do more than a scene requires, meaning he mostly shoots daggers from his eyes and leaves blades in adversaries’ necks, and he’s so good at this wrecking-crew routine that it’s of scant concern that the proceedings are a generic rehash of superior predecessors.
Ayer’s visuals are aptly gritty and Jared Michael Fry’s score telegraphs every twist with unsubtle bombast, and the plot is mostly around to give the headliner a reason to destroy a procession of enemies. It’s as straightforward as they come, and determined to posit its hero as a righteous avenger, such that he even saves Dr. Roth from a burning building and, for his valor, is encouraged by the grandpa to finish what he started.
Levon eventually meets and strikes a drug-distribution pact with Dimi, only to promptly flush the man’s narcotics down the toilet. His sole purpose is extricating Jenny from danger, and fortunately for him, she bides herself (and her savior) some time by taking a huge bite out of the cheek of the creep who’s purchasing her from Dimi. Jenny repeatedly proves her mettle, thereby further casting her as a spiritual chip off the old Levon block, whereas Dimi is depicted as a licentious man-baby akin to the hotheaded Russian crime-boss progeny that John Wick exacted revenge upon for the murder of his dog.
Car chases through the forest and tactical shootouts in a country manor house keep the film from flagging, and though Ayer doesn’t care much about spatial lucidity—much of the carnage is a blistering blur—his rugged style makes it all go down as smoothly as a protein shake.
At this point in his career, Statham can do a project like A Working Man in his sleep, and its resemblance to more than a couple of his prior efforts is hard to ignore, especially once he dons a suit that makes him look like his unstoppable The Transporter wheelman.
Harbour and Peña aren’t granted opportunities to shine—the former just encourages his buddy to kill ‘em all and lends him the firepower to do so as his “weapons sommelier”—and Osinski is a bland baddie. Furthermore, at nearly two hours, the film is slightly bloated, expending energy on both irrelevant plot points that interfere with the rampaging pace, and on wannabe-colorful henchmen who feel like duplicates of innumerable villains gone by.
Still, the pleasures of a B-movie such as this have little to do with originality or depth; rather, they come from the sturdy orchestration of conventional savagery. In that limited regard, it succeeds as surely as Levon does at this mission. Statham may be going through the murderous motions, but in today’s Hollywood, few do it better.
