‘A Working Man’: Jason Statham Action on Autopilot

The brawny but brainless actioner A Working Man is workmanlike in the worst ways—a rote, uninspired vigilante movie that dutifully cranks out the kills with very little flair or fun. On their previous collab, director David Ayer and action star Jason Statham packed a potent sting with the wide-eyed super-soldier covert-ops insanity of The Beekeeper. Expect no honey this time around. 

Both are vendetta movies, with Statham’s glum hero out to avenge his surrogate families. Last time, it was an African-American widow in Massachusetts who killed herself after a brassy underworld phishing scam drained her bank accounts. This time, it’s a Latino construction family in Chicago whose 19-year-old daughter Jenny Garcia (Arianna Rivas) gets kidnapped by human traffickers. Both feature minority families in peril and a haunted white savior whose everyman demeanor belies expert killing-machine training. 

A WORKING MAN  ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: David Ayer
Written by: Sylvester Stallone, David Ayer
Starring: Jason Statham, Michael Peña, David Harbour, Jason Fleming, Arianna Rivas, Maximilian Osinski, Chidi Ajufo
Running time: 94 mins

The Beekeeper’s clumsy constructs and cartoonish villains were forgivable, since the film’s avalanche of conflagrations escalated in the most delightfully bizarre ways. So much paramilitary destruction! So many literally overblown explosions! Ayers has a knack for mouthy rich-boy douchebags, and that film’s felonious tech-bro scammers were just so satisfyingly stupid. A Working Man has no such panache, falling back on tried-and-true 21^st century bad guys: slavic gangsters! Which is very stupid and not very satisfying at all. 

Beloved low-key construction worker Levon Cade (Statham) works for Jenny’s dad Joe (Michael Peña), and the Garcias dote on him with tins of homemade cookies and Tupperware meals. A former Royal Marines commando suffering from untreated PTSD, Levon has no money or apartment, sleeps in his F-150 truck, and struggles to share custody of his daughter Merry (Isla Gie) with Merry’s grandfather Dr. Roth (Richard Heap)—a huge rich-boy douchebag who wears a purple track suit and a fuzzy red bucket hat. 

 Dr. Roth wants to goad Levon into rampant violence so he can lawyer him out of Merry’s life. But Levon keeps his cool, especially since Merry clearly likes him more than her weirdo grandpa. Levon only has $10,000, in two stacks of $5,000, and pays all of it to his fancy high-rise lawyers so they can defend him. Not too sure why he had to pay them in cash, but sure. 

Pesky Illinois Russians get their goons to cherry-pick Jenny from a gaggle of bar-hopping girls so they can ship her off to a tubby balding homunculus willing to pay top dollar for a human sex toy. But feisty Jenny bites off his cheek instead. Oops. 

Joe, aware of Levon’s violent past, offers to pay him $50,000 in stacks of $5,000 to find his daughter. Again, everything is done in this movie with stacks of $5,000. Levon initially says no, due to the violence thing, then confers with his blind woodland military buddy Gunny Lefferty (David Harbour, underused and wasted) and decides to do it. Even though Gunny points out that Levon had already decided to do it regardless. So Levon pretty enthusiastically goes on a rampage against the Russians in the name of the Garcia family and saving his boss’ daughter or whatever. 

There’s a narrative detour that involves Levon using $5,000 stacks, this time wrapped in foil, to buy meth and win the confidence of a Russian-mobster-connected biker bar proprietor named Dutch (Chidi Ajufo), who sits on an ersatz Game of Thrones chair made out of motorcycle muffler pipes. Levon keeps buying meth and throwing it in a nearby river or flushing it down the toilet, almost like he’s hellbent on polluting the local water ways with grade-A bright blue crank.

This connection leads to him meeting with Dimi Kolisnyk (Maximilian Osinski), and Levon dutifully hands him another stack of $5,000 wrapped in foil. Dimi apparently feels like this is enough money to start a meaningful business relationship with Levon. Dimi is also the mischievous scion of the Russian mobster family behind Jenny’s abduction, and he’s the one who instigated all the human trafficking. He’s also a colorful dresser, but not as much as his cousins Danya (Greg Kolpakchi) and Piotr (Vanko Kharchencko), who wear tacky tracksuits with matching bucket hats. Fair to say that, if you’re wearing a track suit and a bucket hat, you’re a rich-boy douchebag villain.

Sylvester Stallone originally wrote the script for A Working Man, with its nods to the blue-collar characters and military veterans that populate his special style of heartstring-and-fisticuffs popcorn pictures. He knows how to tap into working-class sentiment, but here it feels more like worn-out lip service that’s given short shrift so we can have more scenes of Statham pummeling Russian gangsters. Let’s hope Ayers and Statham find another way to work together that brings back the playful oddness of movies like The Beekeeper. Protect the hive, guys!