“A Working Man” opens with a batty pastiche of bullets and buzz saws, parachutes and cranes. A soldier’s corpse rests under an American flag. A cement mixer trundles toward a construction site. There’s something modestly affecting (and complicated) about the career arc of a contractor named Levon Cade (Jason Statham) who once blew up buildings and now erects them, although as a Veterans Day commercial for a hardware store, the montage would be slightly over the top. Director David Ayer is trying to weld a connection between last year’s surprise delight “The Beekeeper,” in which Statham played an assassin turned hive master, and this one, in which he plays an ex-soldier who’s handy with a hammer.
Of these two thrillers, honey turns out to be funnier than hard hats. “A Working Man” strikes an unsteady balance between solemn and ridiculous. The set-up is that sex traffickers have taken the 19-year-old daughter of Levon’s bosses Joe and Carla (Michael Peña and Noemi Gonzalez). Statham stays straight-faced through Levon’s bloody quest to get her back, even at it takes him to places that make “pizzagate” look reasonable: a nightclub with fire jugglers, a backwoods speakeasy gilded like “The Great Gatsby” and a biker bar decorated by hundreds of human skulls and a throne fused from chrome tailpipes. The production and costume designers are having a blast. Even an outdoor scene is lit by a moon so large and low, Levon could drive a tank through it. Maybe they’re saving his space adventures for a sequel.
Levon meets and murders a wacky goon squad that sports everything from vampire chic to chain-metal capelets. Besides one brawl inside a speeding van, the actual fights aren’t that interesting; we’re mostly enjoying the clothes. “I am the big potatoes,” one creep (Maximilian Osinski) preens in a lace cowboy hat and ruffled sleeves. We’re somewhere in Illinois but he looks like he just escaped an asylum in Versailles.
No one in the film comments on any of the frippery. Ayer is simply bedazzling a script that would otherwise feel rudimentary had it starred Liam Neeson in a gray T-shirt. In the movie’s source material, the 2014 novel “Levon’s Trade” (the first of Chuck Dixon’s 12 testosterone-drenched Levon Cade books), the weirdest outfit belongs to a brute wearing “the last Members Only jacket on Earth.”
At its foundation, the movie is a hoary cliché with quirk spackled on it. The construction-worker conceit is dropped faster than a stack of bricks. There’s a fight right up at the top where Levon swings a bucket of nails into a gangster’s face, and after that, his character defaults to his special-ops training: He can’t wait to get to waterboarding. Levon drowns one goon, then another and two more. Too bad the title “Aquaman” was already taken.
The project dates back to before the buzz about the bees. Sylvester Stallone previously tried adapting Dixon’s paperback franchise for TV and is credited as a co-writer alongside Ayer. I appreciate the tweaks they’ve made to the book. (Letting female characters talk, for one.) Ayers made his bones with the streetwise LAPD drama “Training Day,” winning Denzel Washington a lead actor Oscar, and he refuses to take the vigilante genre seriously. Rather, he takes this kind of fear-mongering Fox News dreck as seriously as it deserves — as silly fiction.
“A Working Man” molds the Levon character to Statham, making him a British soldier and tilting the book’s axis of evil away from “ ‘Merica good, everyone else bad.” After 22 years of service doing secret, ghastly things — he keeps his military actions classified — Levon is now in Chicago with PTSD (a condition that gets mentioned once), a dead American wife and a grade-school kid who the courts have decided should live with Levon’s rich father-in-law, Dr. Roth (Richard Heap). Although he’s supposed to be a stuffy neurosurgeon, Dr. Roth wears furry bucket hats and yoga pants. Perhaps the script meant to write “Dennis Rodman.”
The self-serious first stretch of the film drags as it establishes that Levon is a righteous dude who sleeps in his pick-up truck to save cash for his custody battle. It’s a shame the muscle man isn’t invited to carry his share of the comedy. It’s also unnecessary. Anyone who likes this kind of pulp knows these avenging angel characters are more or less the same: intense, taciturn, minimalist. If Levon has a tick, it’s his impatience to get on with the murdering. He offs bad guys with comically little fuss, sometimes before he gets much information out of them. His key strategy seems to be using dead bodies as duck decoys, hunting whoever cares about his latest corpse. As his best pal Gunny (David Harbour) says, “You killed your way into this — you’ll have to kill your way out.”
I dug Arianna Rivas’ Jenny, the kidnapped coed who plays an active role in her own rescue. Jenny’s hobbies include spreadsheets, karate and piano. (She plays “Moonlight Sonata” so often that composer Jared Michael Fry works it into the score.) Jenny also claims to know how to break fingers, although we never see that party trick. Though the character strains credulity, Rivas plays her with aplomb. The build-up to her abduction is oddly adorable: Jenny and her college girlfriends go out dressed in a group costume of skirt-suits and pearls — they’re cosplaying as political wives? — and then do cheerleading routines on a dance floor. Frivolous as it is, these inventive details convince us that Ayer isn’t simply phoning it in.
The bad guys are cannon fodder, though I did like the way one mobster sadly sighs at a grenade before he explodes. Kudos to the casting team for hiring actors with interesting faces — Max Croes, Cokey Falkow and Andrej Kaminsky are now engraved in my memory — and I couldn’t help developing a soft spot for Chidi Ajufo’s Dutch, a fellow veteran whose memorable bits of business include drinking from a comically small teacup and feeding us the movie’s title: “You’re not a cop, you’re a working man.”
Dutch also merits the film’s second-most poignant exit. The most emotional goes to a gun that’s given a full military salute. Ayer knows what his audience wants and he’s willing to give it to them. He’s a working man, too, but at least his product is custom-crafted.
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