Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Working Man’ on VOD, Jason Statham and David Ayer’s Follow-up to ‘The Beekeeper’

I feel like I’ve seen 200 Jason Statham movies in the past couple years, and I keep waiting for the next one to be one too many. A Working Man (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) might just be it, although I hesitate to point an accusatory finger at its headliner, who consistently upholds the spirit of old-school action stars even if the movie he’s in is dreck. Statham reunites with his The Beekeeper director David Ayer, whose career has veered wildly from impressively muscular (End of Watch and Fury; he also wrote Training Day) to miserably bad (Bright, Suicide Squad). This new outing adds a couple of bona-fides to the creative mix, with Ayer and Sylvester Stallone Himself collaborating on a script, which is based on the novel Levon’s Trade by Chuck Dixon, a comic book writer with impressive credits including Batman and The Punisher. A Working Man feels like a thematic continuation from the wildly, entertainingly stupid Beekeeper, which set a new precedent for Statham ridiculousness. But that’s a tougher act to follow than you might expect.

A WORKING MAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Question: Has Statham ever not played an ex-OPS guy? You know, special OPS, black OPS, OPS OPS OPS? He’s definitely got the face for OPS – stern, expressionless, observant, chilly, eyes lasering through all the things he looks at. So it goes for A Working Man, where he plays Levon Cade, a former Royal Marines whupper-of-asses, but now the thing in the title of the movie. He’s a foreman for a construction company owned by the Garcias (Michael Pena and Noemi Gonzalez), and he’s seen and done things, things far beyond tossing around two-by-fours and peen hammers. You know how Milhouse’s freshly divorced dad once bragged that he sleeps in a racecar bed? Well, Levon one-ups the Sad Dadness by sleeping in his truck and starting his mornings with a little powdered instant coffee he stirs over the steering wheel. Does he heat up the water? I’m not sure if he heats the water. But Statham characters don’t give a shit about heating the water. They don’t need hot coffee unless they have to scald an evil motherf—er’s face with some. 

Before we get to the violence, let’s address why he sleeps in his truck. He’s a widower with an adorable daughter, Merry (Isla Gie), who lives with his rich dicknose of a father-in-law, who’s trying to cut into Levon’s already miniscule custody. So Levon needs every penny he can scrounge to pay lawyers so he can see his kid – although all the violence he perpetrates throughout the movie is an argument against his fatherly agency, but never mind, because in movies like this, it’s OK to take the law into your own hands and torture and kill hopelessly nasty criminals who sell drugs and engage in sex trafficking. So in this context, remember, it’s perfectly fine to cheer on Levon every time he snaps a neck or puts a bullet in a creep’s liver, then go on with your life like you just didn’t root for a sociopath for two hours.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: the traffickers kidnap his daughter, right? Nope! They kidnap the Garcias’ teenage daughter, Jenny (Arianna Rivas), because this plot is complicated for no good reason whatsoever. How complicated? Complicated enough that there’s several layers of bad guys for Levon to kill, in about a dozen noteworthy credited roles. They’re all overdressed, scarred up, tattooed or sitting on massive Game of Thrones thrones but made out of motorcycle parts, unto great comedy, although it didn’t help me really differentiate them in any way, or figure out if there was any kind of hierarchy to the criminal enterprise. But who cares, right? I mean, most of them are Russian mobsters, and very few of those movie characters boast any redeeming qualities beyond having ugly faces just begging to be punched or shotgunned into hamburger. Oh, and David Harbour has two, maybe three expendable scenes in the movie, playing one of Levon’s old pals. Anyway, Statham does what Statham does, with what kind of efficiency, class? That’s right – brutal efficiency. There’s no other way for Statham to do it, really.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Stallone-trash classic Cobra comes to mind, but at least that movie had its tongue in its cheek. A Working Man is generic Statham, less like his nudgy-winky stuff in Guy Ritchie films, The Beekeeper or Spy, more like The Mechanic, Parker or Wild Card.

Performance Worth Watching: Statham sternfaces his way through this too-serious material like a pro, albeit an uninspired pro. Only Chidi Ajufo, as the baddie on the biker throne, seems to be making the best of things, injecting a little spirit into his line readings.

Memorable Dialogue: Here’s two good ones via bad guys:

“Who are you? Who are you? F— you. F— you! F— youuuuuuuuuuuuuu!” – Wolo Kolisnyk (Jason Flemyng)

“Look at those bricks. You ain’t a cop – you’re a working man!” – Dutch (Ajufo)

Sex and Skin: Nah.

Our Take: One can sense the silent push-and-pull between the Rambo-style seriousness of Stallone’s writing and Ayer’s compulsion to inject the film with some sly Stathamesque comedy. Which leaves A Working Man in a tonal no-man’s land – it’s flat, bland and flavorless, and true to its title in its workmanlike trudge to get through the day, punch out at 5 p.m. and crack a cold one. It’s all punchy-kicky-shooty without much creativity or inspiration. There’s one scene where Levon slaughters a man, looks down at his “brick” of a hand, possibly almost maybe contemplates what he’s just done, then moves on to the next douchebag. Death is just a part of life, you know! 

Meanwhile, the story trudges on for nearly two hours, Levon repeatedly ending up in a wooded swamp that’s symbolic of the movie’s loggy pacing, our “hero” apparently OK with taking his sweet time gettin’ ’er done as teenage Jenny faces a fate worse than death – theoretically, anyway, since she bites and scratches her captors and generally never really seems afraid of anything because, um, feminism? Sure. Feminism.

Stylistically, the film is a slophouse of untamed visual flourishes and a mad dog of a costuming department that really needed to be tranquilized and leashed. There’s a HIGHLY THEMATIC reason for that, though, since true-blue-collar dudes like Levon are fine in workboots and Carhartts while the bad guys get all foppish with vests, canes, hats, eyeliner, fur coats, chainmail, viking helmets and batty haircuts. Meanwhile, Ayer can’t decide if he wants to kill us with LENS FLARE, digital blood or death-by-a-thousand-cuts action-sequence editing. None of this sets Statham up for success, mind you, and it all comes off disappointingly humorless, a squandering of his genially homicidal screen presence. One gets the sense that Ayer knows exactly what he’s doing, but doesn’t care if it makes any visual or tonal sense. With A Working Man, he’s just an artist making bad art.

Our Call: Sub-par Statham. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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