Movie Review: A Working Man
A Working Man is a movie whose only purpose is to let moviegoers watch Jason Statham beat the living hell out of dozens of bad people. It doesn’t care about the story, and the characters are forgettable and might as well not have actual names. They would have been better suited with names like Henchmen #1 or Bike Rider #2. The body count is almost uncountable, and the finale is a barrage of bullets, blood, and violence.
But A Working Man works at the level it does because it knows this. Co-written by David Ayer and Sylvester Stallone and directed by Ayer, A Working Man doesn’t try to be something it’s not. It doesn’t have a message to the world other than that there are bad people who need to be stopped. Statham just does what we expect from him, and he does it well. The action scenes are loud, chaotic, and exciting. Were we expecting anything else?
Statham plays Levon Cade, a highly skilled former Green Beret who is now the manager of a construction crew. He is currently in charge of a building for the Garcia family, Joe (Michael Peña), his wife Carla (Noemi Gonzalez), and their daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas), who just finished her first year of college and helps her parents with their business. One night, when Jenny goes out with her friends, she is kidnapped by an unknown group of Russians. The Garcias, knowing Cade is a former military man, enlist him to find their daughter. Despite immediate reservations due to trying to gain custody of his daughter, Cade agrees, and it sends him down a path deeper than he expects.
I was unaware A Working Man was co-written by Sylvester Stallone. My surprised and confused gasp during the opening credits might have startled the few people around me, but as the film went on, it made complete sense. If A Working Man had come out in the 1980s, it would have been the perfect vehicle for Stallone. It wouldn’t have ranked in the top tier of Stallone action movies, but would have landed more in the range of the Rambo sequels or a one-off like Cobra, fun, entertaining movies, but not one of their best.
A Working Man lands in the same spot for Statham. This isn’t one of Statham’s best, like the Crank films or last year’s The Beekeeper (his first collaboration with director David Ayer), but would land somewhere in the middle in his filmography. This is Statham 101. His physicality and toughness are on full display. He has very little dialogue (most of Cade’s talking comes when he is threatening or interrogating bad guys), and his scowling brow hardly ever leaves his face. It’s the kind of performance we expect from Statham, and he always delivers when playing characters like these. None of the other characters in the film matter. The Garcias are barely in the film, and the Russians who took Jessie are classic henchmen. They’re dumb, their motivation is weak, and they have a lot of money and ammunition but can’t seem to stop one man despite significantly outnumbering him. It’s a lot of fun watching Statham take these guys out, especially in the film’s hectic, insane finale.
David Ayer knows how to make a trash action movie, which is great, because it’s a genre of film we need to keep alive. These aren’t perfect films and ultimately don’t require much thinking, but they are entertaining as hell. A Working Man runs a little too long and gets redundant, but after this and The Beekeeper, I would love to see Ayer and Statham make a movie like this every year.
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