A Working Man may be the Jason Statham-iest film ever to Stath. With its man-on-a-mission, hunt-for-a-kidnapped-girl narrative, it borrows wholeheartedly from the likes of Commando and Taken, and effectively steals from John Wick in the “weapons sommelier” played by David Harbour. But this is first and foremost a Jason Statham film, boiled down to its essential ingredients — losing all flavour and substance in the process.
Statham ostensibly plays a character called Levon Cade, but in a very real, more accurate sense, he plays a character called ‘Jason Statham’: a tough guy with a mysterious military past and an unplaceable Essex-by-way-of-Beverly-Hills accent who dispatches a succession of forgettable goons in order to save the day. It is exactly the same type found in all his recent roles, often in films with similar job-title titles: The Mechanic, The Transporter, The Beekeeper.
The last — which featured the appalling line, “To bee or not to bee!” — was directed by David Ayer, who returns here for A Working Man. Ayer has co-written the script with Statham’s fellow Expendable, Sylvester Stallone, adapting the novel Levon's Trade by Chuck Dixon. But despite all the talent and experience behind it, there is so much here that seems careless or ill-thought out, from the ugly human-trafficking plot to the atrocious dialogue. (“Violence follows you like a cloud,” one character haughtily tells Cade. Does that even work as a simile? Do clouds follow?)
It’s witless, suspense-free, tedious.
Statham at least looks the business: strong, implacable, his perfectly maintained stubble never in doubt, his angular physique as rigid as it’s ever been. Now 57, he is not as agile as he used to be, but he still convinces. Yet the action here is utterly flat, Cade’s much-trumpeted skillset as an ex-Royal Marine never compelling. His best move is to intimidate a bad guy by overpouring maple syrup on his pancakes. Otherwise he seems contractually immune to gunshots, never in jeopardy, never any danger of actual drama or tension. It’s witless, suspense-free, tedious.
Shockingly inept editing doesn’t help: frantic cutting never lets the fight choreography breathe, and structurally many scenes do not flow into one another, while entire plot threads — Statham visits his lawyers about custody of his child, only for the film to entirely forget about that and never once revisit it — are discarded.
All of which might just be forgivable if there was something else to cling onto. Where are the characters to actually care about? Where are the slick, acrobatic stunts? Where are the cool one-liners? Statham’s response to a villain promising to cut his heart out is to simply respond: “Good luck!”. Good luck? That’s it? Is that all you’ve got? Where is the Statham who might have offered, as he once did, “I now pronounce you man and knife”? Or, “I’m immune to 179 different types of poison”? Where is even the slightest sense of fun? Don’t we come to these films to have a good time? What are we even doing here?
