A Working Man
- fivedollartuesday
- Apr 8
- 3 min read
Having enjoyed last year's The Beekeeper, I was excited to continue with the Statham streak (I'm committing to that bit purely for alliteration purposes; please don't be the worst). But, while I'll concede A Working Man is a decent enough follow-up, ultimately, its story beats and direction fail in ways that, despite having the same man, David Ayer, at the helm, really drop the ball (or bucket, if you, like Statham, are also the main character).
Our hero, "Levon Cade" (Jason Statham), is a hardworking foreman on a construction site, doing whatever he can to keep his daughter in his life. When his boss' daughter goes missing, he must draw on his past military training and friends to find her and bring her home.
Jason Statham brings his usual gruff, growly line readings to A Working Man, and he's so cool I can't hate it. He doesn't have any pretenses of vanishing into the role; it's still very much Statham, but he sells it. Plus, between the violence, there are some good moments with his on-screen daughter "Merry" (Isla Gie). Despite often feeling like these scenes weren't fully fleshed out past the outline stage, they worked well enough based on the actors.
Unfortunately, I didn't really resonate with the performance of the boss' (played by Michael Peña and Noemi Gonzalez) daughter and kidnap victim "Jenny," played by Arianna Rivas. However, I think that's most likely due to direction choices and not Rivas. Undeniably, being trafficked is terrifying and unimaginably challenging to cope with. But Jenny's character is rarely utterly terrified so much as she is defiant. I think even a terrified defiance would've played better, but her very real lack of fear has a hard time selling the story's stakes.
And, while I love the addition of David Harbour as Cade's old blind weapons buddy "Gunny Lefferty," I didn't love how he was written into the story. Not his immediate characterization by almost sending an arrow straight through Cade's head; that was cinema. But his introduction comes at a moment in the story where Cade's wrestling with the decision over whether or not to lean into his old life to rescue his boss's daughter. And there's good reason he should wrestle with it, given the situation with his own daughter. But the film has Cade making this decision in the pick-up on the drive over to his buddy. All Gunny really gets to say is, "I don't know why you bothered asking me if you already made up your mind." And now, frankly, I'm not convinced I don't have a mysterious health problem where I'm blacking out scenes where characters work out problems. Could it be an editing-to-get-down-to-a-specific time screw-up? Sure. But there's much more drama in my worst-case scenario.
And then there's the villain. Or, more accurately, villains. There were just too many of them, and I kept forgetting who was connected to who and why they were important. It seems the script, written in part by director Ayer as well as Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Dixon, was going for a tangled web of human traffickers á la Taken (2008), which is logical. Still, it just comes off as needlessly complicated. While The Beekeeper had "stages" of villains until we got to our main bad guy, it never feels like we're making any progress here. Each new villain stage sends us on a side quest that doesn't consequentially affect the main plot and seems to only exist to say, "Drugs aren't cool" (a sentiment I can agree with, but we might as well have put Jason in a D.A.R.E t-shirt for the same amount of subtlety).
...we might as well have put Jason in a D.A.R.E t-shirt for the same amount of subtlety.
Also, I'm just nitpicking now, but we briefly cut to a phone conversation with another of Cade's old war buddies "Tobias Garret" (Wayne Gordon), who now works at the DEA. We exchange pleasantries, learn helpful information, AND THEN NEVER SEE GARRET AGAIN. Garret's on screen long enough to suggest that he will be pertinent later. This would be as good a time as any to get Cade's old crew together. But no. Garret vanishes as mysteriously as he came.
All this being said, if you're in the mood for a fast-ish-paced action flick with a lot of blood (though not as much as The Beekeeper), this is worth a six-dollar ticket. It's true: we're not breaking any new ground here. But, in A Working Man's defense, what did you think you were getting going to a Jason Statham movie? It's kind of the point.
