A WORKING MAN is a 2025 Jason Statham joint that I missed in theaters. Felt guilty about it too. Then waited until now to catch up on video, for some reason. I agree with the conventional wisdom that it’s not one of his better works, but in my opinion it is in fact watchable. So that’s what I did. I watched it.
It’s a much less absurd one than THE BEEKEEPER, even though it comes from the same director, David Ayer. Being a little less silly is not a bad thing in and of itself (I really liked Statham’s recent more serious one, SHELTER), but it is kind of weird coming from the director of wild movies like SABOTAGE and SUICIDE SQUAD. They aren’t all great, but they’re usually not bland. Here he’s credited as co-writing the screenplay with Sylvester Stallone (who also wrote HOMEFRONT), based on the novel Levon’s Trade by Chuck Dixon. (Note: Stallone sold out his legacy to become a Trump stooge and Dixon is one of the comics legends now better known for whining about the scary wokeness coming after him, but thankfully the movie isn’t really pushing right wing buttons like, say, LAST BLOOD.)
It uses one of the most elemental action setups possible. Statham’s character, apparently named Levon Cade (I’m surprised they didn’t say his name more) is a foreman for Garcia Family Construction, but he used to be a Royal Marine Commando. He doesn’t tell anybody that, but it comes out when some gangsters are shaking down one of the workers on the site so Levon comes at them with a bucket of nails and a pickaxe, beats them up and points a gun at them until they leave. The boss’s 19-year-old business major daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas, Mustang from BLACK PHONE 2) witnesses this and asks if it’s “some military shit.”
It’s a ridiculous trope that I still get a kick out of: the TAKEN/EQUALIZER idea that if you were in the military or intelligence community it means you learned all the secret wrist breaking and gun disarming moves and can effortlessly take on any number of badasses, even (especially?) if they’re armed and you’re not. Since it’s Statham it’s more of a full-on martial arts type of fight, but that’s what’s funny is that she still knows he learned it in the military. Later she’ll be abducted and her parents (Michael Peña [OBSERVE AND REPORT] and Noemi Gonzalez [PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES]) will come to Levon for help, explaining that they have a Green Beret relative so they can tell he was in the military. IYKYK.
The one unusual thing is that the opening credits illustrate his military history with computer animated renderings of war and bullets and his British passport and a cement mixer that turns into a hand grenade. I guess that last one made it worthwhile, but it felt very weird that they needed to illustrate his past. That’s never been a requirement for Statham. Tell us he’s ex-something if you must, or just have him kick ass and don’t explain it. Trust me, we’ll go along with it. Of course we don’t need animation to tell us he was in The War On Terror, because why the hell else would he be so into waterboarding? Normal people would never consider doing water torture on a person, it is just not an idea or desire that comes up. This guy does it twice.
When he scared the Mexican gangsters away in that first fight I thought uh oh, this is like LAST BLOOD, Stallone’s hero has to love one “good” Mexican family so that it’s okay that the rest are shown as invading monsters. I wondered whether these guys would be the ones to kidnap the daughter or if it would be another party and later he’d cross these guys again and it would complicate things because he has two different factions to fight. Actually it’s neither! They take his advice and don’t come back. No MS-13 business in this, the bad guys are just Russian. Oh shit, is this that wokeness? I like it.
The abduction is similar to that goofy Milla Jovovich movie I enjoyed recently, PROTECTOR – Jenny goes out with her friends for underage drinking on her birthday, somebody grabs her, a sleazy bartender is in on it. Jenny is one-of-a-kind though so her night involves renting a party van, providing fake IDs for all participants and giving her dad an itemized invoice for it all. (Well, probly not the IDs.)
Levon first says he can’t help, that’s not his life anymore, but immediately changes his mind and begins investigating leads, using his laptop, security footage zooming, following a tracking device he puts on a car, moving his way through a trail of Russian gangsters until he gets to a guy named Dimi (Maximilian Osinski, GREYHOUND). I like that these gangsters have very over-the-top fashion, including a pair of henchmen who wear shiny track suits with bucket hats. There’s a funny bit that Levon kills a guy and leaves the body, the guy’s Russian mafia boss Wolo Kolisnyk (Jason Flemyng, LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN) shows up and bribes a cleaning crew to dispose of the body, pretty soon Levon has killed Kolisnyk and somebody higher up pays the same crew to get rid of his body. Business is good.
It took me a while to understand that this isn’t some ransom situation, it’s just human trafficking, and for some reason they specifically want Jenny for some particular rich guy, so a whole network of criminals dedicates an inordinate amount of time on it, convinced they will get lots of money (but contradictorily being confused by Levon caring so much. It’s just one girl, they say).
Levon is not a father figure to Jenny, just a co-worker. He actually has a young daughter named Merry (Isla Gie, LEGEND HAS IT) but he only gets to see her two hours a week. She lives with her grandpa Dr. Roth (Richard Heap), a rich guy who blames Levon for his daughter’s suicide and always lectures him about violence. Also he’s not the type of guy you’d expect as snooty father-in-law – he’s a big tall dude with a deep voice, introduced wearing a furry Jamiroquai type hat.
Trying to regain custody, Levon has to stop sleeping in his gigantic construction worker truck and establish a steady residence. The exaggerated shittiness of the place he rents out is funny because it looks almost the same as the sex trafficking dungeon where they lock up Jenny. Maybe they’re neighbors.
During the course of his crusade Levon takes a bunch of money off of dead gangsters, so I thought it would be funny if he started staying in increasingly nicer places. Instead he uses some of the money to fund his activities and throws some into a swimming pool.
Of course Levon calls upon old friends for help, including a blind ex-Marine (David Harbour, HELLBOY 2019) who gives him weapons and a DEA agent who tells him to go undercover buying a blue crystalline drug to find Dimi. First he has to go to a bar called Hattie’s (not the one in Ballard) and demand passage into the backroom where the leader of a biker gang (Chidi Ajufo, DOOM: ANNIHILATION) sits on a throne like the one in Game of Thrones except it’s made out of motorcycle mufflers instead of swords. They bond and call each other “brother” when they recognize each other as veterans, so even though this guy’s a drug dealer working with human traffickers Levon respectfully closes his dead eyelids after stabbing a hunting knife all the way through his neck into a pillar.
One thing that makes this more tolerable than other versions of the exact same story is that Jenny has a little more personality and a little more to do than the usual crying victim. She gets to be funny a couple times, also gets to fight back, even bites off chunks of flesh on two separate occasions. At the beginning there’s a part where her dad is listing things he’s provided for her and one of them is karate lessons. Peña’s delivery left me in suspense as to whether it was a set up for some karate or just the off-the-cuff gag he plays it as. Later we see a karate trophy in her bedroom so I thought okay, they’re probly gonna do it but if not it’s a genuine genre violation. No problem, they do do it – she’s tied at the wrists but she swings around kicking and scissoring. Also they do the trope where there’s one female henchperson for her to fight. Her name is Artemis (Eve Mauro, BULLET) and she’s a pretty funny character because she’s constantly throwing tantrums about how bad everything is going.
You get a couple fun Statham fights, some explosions, a chase on a motorcycle that I think was maybe greenscreen? But not elaborate like the one in THE VILLAINESS. Fight coordinators are Guillermo Grispo (THE LEGEND OF HERCULES) and Darren Nop (BLACK WIDOW). The action is entertaining enough, but not as involved as in THE BEEKEEPER, which stunt coordinator/second unit director Eddie J. Fernandez also worked on.
And that kinda sums it up – a mid-range Statham vehicle, decent but unspectacular. The good news is that’s above average for the majority of prolific action stars. If I have a major complaint, it’s that the whole “working man” angle is bigger in the marketing than the movie. He works construction at the beginning and does fight with tools a few times, but I would like to see him dump some cement on somebody, headbutt a guy while wearing a construction helmet, maybe erect a whole building that he needs for his plan. A night club where he has to meet somebody. Or a house for himself. He’s a working man, but I know he could work harder. Still, I’m glad Statham is still pumping ‘em out. In these times we’ve gotta have one institution we can count on.
