I guess that’s what he is.
DIRECTED BY DAVID AYER/2025
Congratulations are due for venerable action star Jason Statham. Per my understanding, he’s the last movie star standing who’s able to claim that every film he’s starred in has premiered on the big screen. In today’s streaming world, this feat comes as both refreshing and surprising. Statham has amassed considerable goodwill from movie fans over years for simply doing what he does. He may not hit the target every time, but his cache remains structurally intact. Hopefully for him, his latest effort, A Working Man, won’t cause any future efforts to break his streak.
No need to sugarcoat it- this movie is bad. This is a bigger disappointment when one considers how well received the previous collab between Statham and director David Ayer, The Beekeeper, was just a year ago. A Working Man has a rushed, trite laziness about it, maybe bolstered by the fact that the star is no spring chicken. Fight sequences that might’ve once been spectacles of choreographed fisticuffs are ultra-choppy and chaotic, hinging on an over-reliance on quick close-ups and loud crunching sound effects. Frankly, an action movie veteran like Ayer (Suicide Squad, Sabotage, Fury) ought to know better than this.
The film’s title, “A Working Man”, implies a degree of Hitchcockian everyman-ism- just an ordinary guy who finds himself caught up in a flurry of trouble. That simply isn’t a part of this. (It’s Rambo as opposed to “Pizza-gate is real”). Far from being the story of a “good man with a gun ready to solve a problem”, flinty Brit Statham plays Levon Cade, formerly of the Royal Marines- an elite military branch which is equated to the American Green Berets more than once. Cade is done with the service and the blood-soaked special ops life he led back in the day. Nowadays, he’s a single father of a little girl (Isla Gie) and content to work as a no-nonsense foreman on a heavy-duty Chicago construction site.
The film starts with Cade briefing his melting pot of fellow hardhats that today is going to be extremely difficult. He rattles off the major tasks, inspections, and deadlines that hang over their heads- the kind of work that you get callouses just thinking about. A designated translator translates for the non-English speaking contingent, and everyone nods in solidarity. Fist bumps. Between that manipulated devotion to “going the extra mile” and the number of glaring OCHA violations on this job site, I’m guessing this is not a Union worksite. Cade’s intimidating to-do list could be the plot of a very different movie. Instead, all that immediately goes out the window when a few toughs who aren’t from around here wander in and start making trouble. Don’t worry, Cade makes short work of them with a handy bucket of nails. Yowch.
Anyhow, things escalate as they’re want to do in films like this. Cade’s big-hearted boss, Joe’s (Micheal Peña) college-aged daughter (Arianna Rivas) goes missing after a night of routine partying with her friends. Cade, being the only former special-ops guy trained to kill that Joe knows, convinces him to take up that suppressed skills set one last time. Cade carries some unspoken trauma and would really rather not. But of course, he does. What follows is a fully run-of-the-mill descent into the most darkly psychopathic queer-coded Qanon-imagined crime-ridden corners of Joliet, Illinois. (Fact: There are only two cops in this rural town, and both are corrupt).
The film’s source material is a novel by comic book writing perennial Chuck Dixon. Dixon’s 2014 Levon’s Trade is, in fact, the first in a series featuring the exploits of Levon Cade. The tagline? “It’s time for him to return to his trade. And Levon’s trade is death.” To Dixon’s great credit, he’s the kind of author who makes the reader understand the significance of firearm and military minutia. A recognizable smidgen of that makes its way into A Working Man. It would’ve been better if there was more.
The adapted screenplay is credited to Ayer and none other than Sylvester Stallone- Rambo himself!- who intended it to be a TV series. Typing this up was probably a COVID-era lockdown time-killer for Stallone, whom the U.S. president recently tasked with “making Hollywood great again.” If this is the first effort on that behalf, then sorry, no dice. Although when A Working Man was in development, Stallone might not yet have gotten the MAGA memo that “Darnit, Russia is good!!”. In this movie’s meh vehicular chase, Statham runs Russian mob thugs by a huge wall prominently sporting a big blue and yellow graffitied “UKRAINE!”
At every turn, Ayer and company erect guardrails against accusations of A Working Man being a rightwinger’s wet dream. (Which it still manages to be, however less intense). When the boss’ daughter that gets kidnapped is out partying with her friends at a happenin’ club, they’re all dressed like repressed church ladies and buttoned-up office managers. So no one can allege that anyone was “asking for it”. While all the villains are non-white or of foreign descent, our hero is also the latter. So is his boss and the kidnapped daughter. When Cade has to take his little girl to his blind Duck Dynasty-looking buddy’s (David Harbour) off-the-grid libertarian dream cabin, we meet his wife of Hispanic/indigenous heritage. It’s a nothing character, as she’s only there as shorthand that Harbour’s character is on the up and up, and that Cade isn’t just leaving his young daughter with a strange grown man in the woods. I’m probably the wrong guy to say for sure, but I suspect that such multicultural/Time’s Up buffering will only look “woke” to the wrong people. (When you currently do an online image search for this film, you get a lot of fan-generated images of Statham posing with a scantily clad Tomb Raider-esque Jennifer Lopez, among other girls. In reality, not even a half inch of cleavage is shown in this quite violent movie).
After the screening, my colleague Max Foizey pointed out that Ayer is perhaps airing grievances related to his misbegotten 2016 DC superhero film, Suicide Squad. Max may be onto something, as A Working Man is chock full of the kind of outlandishly adorned badguys in this otherwise ordinary world. Skeletal tattoos, elaborate headwear, wild suits (with matching bucket hats), and more, evoke Jared Leto’s Joker, among other things. At one point, a civilian supporting character recreates Harley Quinn’s ab-crunching leg-strangulation stunt that Margot Robbie spent the press tour for James Gunn’s awkward 2021 DC follow-up, The Suicide Squad, bragging about. In Ayers’ world, anyone can do that. Pshaw.
Things go wrong on construction sites; we know this from other movies. Beams break loose from crane suspension. Someone falls into wet cement. Nail gun massacres. What A Working Man shows us is that there’s no problem on such a job site that can’t be solved with a pail of nails to the face. That and a trusty M14, and a movie star’s theatrical winning streak, might carry the workaday A Working Man to its permanent vacation… on a streaming platform.