In A Working Man, Jason Statham plays a former British special forces operative who is called back into action to find a young woman (Arianna Rivas) abducted by vicious human traffickers.Dan Smith/Amazon MGM Studios film
A Working Man
Directed by David Ayer
Written by Sylvester Stallone and David Ayer, based on the novel Levon’s Trade by Chuck Dixon
Starring Jason Statham, David Harbour and Michael Peña
Classification 14A; 116 minutes
There is an impressive stubbornness to Jason Statham’s kick-first-ask-questions-later career.
More than a quarter-century deep into his filmography, the former athlete having burst onto the scene with Guy Ritchie’s 1998 crime comedy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Statham has done one thing exceptionally well (beating up bad guys) while refusing to do the one thing that American movie executives have surely asked of him too many times (performing in an accent other than his own).
Whether the action star is going toe-to-toe with maniacal gangsters, blood-thirsty mercenaries or giant prehistoric sharks, there exists an unspoken promise made between Statham and his fans: If you buy a ticket to one of his movies, then you are guaranteed at least two-dozen upper-cut punches, half a dozen bone-crunching kneecaps and no fewer than five sub-Schwarzenegger quips. And because Statham has so rigorously stuck to this blood-and-blokes formula for so long – only sporadically proving that he’s very much in on the joke, such as his turn in Paul Feig’s delightfully witty Spy or the truly bonkers Crank films – the man has rightfully become the physical Hollywood manifestation of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
So it is not an issue, then, whether long-time Statham followers will find familiar comfort in his latest movie, A Working Man. All the traditional Statham trappings are here, from preposterously evil villains to obscenely high body counts to the star playing – what else? – a former British special forces operative. But does the new film merely meet expectations, or does it at least try to flex a different kind of muscle? That is a question that director David Ayer seems to be wrestling with every other minute of A Working Man, a mostly enjoyable brawl that is still one or two body slams short of a TKO.
There are signs early on that A Working Man might have once been imagined as being a little different from the usual Statham fare. Its script comes courtesy of Sylvester Stallone, who in adapting Chuck Dixon’s novel Levon’s Trade aims to inject some blue-collar grit into the proceedings – a kind of Rocky-fied version of The Transporter or Statham’s other one-man army movies. Or perhaps Stallone’s inspiration was more accurately mined from Liam Neeson’s Taken franchise, given that A Working Man’s story focuses on one exceptionally skilled individual (Statham, naturally) who, having long ago walked away from the killing fields, is called back into action to find a young woman (Arianna Rivas) abducted by vicious human traffickers.
Whatever Stallone might have been trying to do with the material, though, doesn’t ultimately make it to the screen, with any deviations from the typical Statham formula more or less washed out by the time the hero throws his first punch. As his character – construction foreman by day, devoted dad by night – gradually works his way up the rungs of the Chicago underworld, the movie shifts into autopilot mode. Bodies are sliced, shot and – in one quasi-memorable scene involving Statham’s fellow Guy Ritchie partner in crime Jason Flemyng – artfully drowned. But no limits are ultimately tested, no boundaries crossed.
As in their previous collaboration, the more self-assured and zippier 2024 thriller The Beekeeper, Ayer and Statham occasionally flirt with the absurd and surreal here, such as outfitting a drug kingpin’s backroom-bar lair as if it were Satan’s throne room or costuming a pair of Russian thugs as if they escaped from Ed Hardy’s discount warehouse. But the movie’s outré touches are too few and far between, awkwardly slipped in between set pieces that rely on by-the-numbers melees and shootouts.
Meanwhile, attempts to humanize Statham’s killing machine – such as giving him an adorable little daughter, who he is naturally estranged from by no fault of his own – do little but stall the film from delivering on its promised bloodbaths. Even more frustrating is when the movie introduces a blind badass character played by Stranger Things’ David Harbour, and then refuses to put him into any kind of onscreen action.
As a tried-and-tested Statham movie, A Working Man rests somewhere between his passable Mechanic films and the intriguing but mostly forgotten 2013 family-in-peril thriller Homefront (another film written by the star’s erstwhile Expendables co-star Stallone). It’s a solid notch in Statham’s career, but nothing that will change anyone’s mind about the actor. But hey, it’s a living, right?