In A Working Man, Jason Statham has truly settled into his late-career Liam Neeson phase, where he plays a manly man with a martial background who takes on lowlifes in a suburban world where testicles are illegal.
Levon Cade (Statham) is a Gulf War veteran working as a construction foreman for his friend Joe (Michael Peña) when Joe’s daughter (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped. He uses his Particular Set of Skills to track down the people responsible and return her to her family.
Like a rom-com for men, Cade is set up as your quintessential stand-up, put-upon tough guy with limited access to his daughter, who lives with his overprotective, wealthy father-in-law. He’s living in a place barely better than a homeless shelter so he can pour all his earnings into legal fees to improve his custody rights. He’s practically a study in how to display a good character. He even stands up for migrant workers on his construction site. Despite his role being to save his friend’s daughter at tremendous personal risk, the film carpet-bombs the audience with good-guy signifiers. It’s only missing a scene where he makes the lame walk and the blind see.
The villains are made so villainous that even though they’re selling crystal meth and kidnapped women, they also have to be shown to be wife-beaters and lunatics with terrible fashion-sense. In what seems like a diplomatic move, when it turns out that it’s the local chapter of the Russian mob behind the kidnapping, the writers added some tension between the rogue elements doing human trafficking and the more traditional, honorable gangsters.
To be curt, A Working Man has been made many times before but usually better. Directed by David Ayer, with Sylvester Stallone as a co-writer, this feels almost like it was put together using a dartboard. The action is very competently shot and quite satisfying in a bludgeoning sort of way, but every other aspect of the film is so embarrassingly poor that it crosses the line into unintentional comedy. The dialogue will have even the most undiscerning viewer laughing, and Cade’s completely unfocused, rambling, tension-free investigation of a missing girl feels more like a series of disconnected events involving punching and gunfire. Even One of Them Days had the sense to pace itself with a timer to generate some tension, whereas our Cade merely bumbles from fight to fight until he finds Jenny in the perfect location for a big fight. Yes, of course this final fight is in a disgusting, rotting casino in the woods frequented by gamblers who really should have money for a better class of venue. It’s clear that it’s supposed to show a kind of decadent underworld, but what it actually shows is that the filmmakers wanted to do an extended firefight in a cheap, controllable location. It’s just that kind of film.
A Working Man is a genuinely bad movie. It’s also perversely entertaining. You’re immediately aware of what it’s trying to do and then left giggling at its ineptitude. It’s so over-the-top, so half-witted and so parodically ultra-manly that the only thing missing is a laugh track. If you’re a connoisseur of the so-bad-it’s-good genre, this is your film. Anyone else should likely give it a wide berth.
