Today's employers expect far too much from their workers. They expect you to work through your lunch. To stay on an extra half hour without overtime. To answer phone calls, texts and emails outside of office. To start a war with the Russian mob when your boss's daughter gets herself abducted.
That's the liberty taken by construction magnate Joe Garcia (Michael Peña) towards his site foreman Levon Cade (Jason Statham) when his teenage daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is snatched from a Chicago bar during a night of underage drinking. Levon is an ex-Royal Marine, and Joe knows all about his special set of skills. But Levon has left that life behind. He's a working man now, one who just wants to keep his head down and raise enough money to hire a lawyer that will get him custody of his daughter (Isla Gie) from his late wife's disapproving father. On the other hand, he did promise Jenny that he would always have her back, and so Levon accepts the assignment.
Movies like A Working Man were two a penny in cinemas a few decades ago, but now they come but once a year and always have Statham in the lead role, now that Liam Neeson has lost his box office appeal. Statham movies tend to fall into one of two camps: the cartoonish (The Beekeeper; Crank; The Meg) and the gritty (Homefront; Hummingbird; Blitz). A Working Man veers between these two modes from scene to scene. It starts off with Statham in gritty mode, the influence of Sylvester Stallone as co-screenwriter palpable in early scenes that focus on the struggles of a big burly working class man to do the right thing by his kid. If it initially seems we're in for something along the lines of the earlier Stallone-scripted Statham vehicle Homefront, which sensitively demythologised the action genre against the backdrop of recession-era small town America, it's not long before we're reminded that we're watching a movie from David Ayer, director of Suicide Squad and The Beekeeper.
The movie gets increasingly cartoonish as Statham finds himself descending further into a John Wick-style criminal underworld populated by Russian mobsters with bad accents and worse fashion sense. By the final act we're in a version of Chicago that doesn't remotely resemble the real world, where gangsters can shoot up nightclubs and stick around for a chit chat without the cops descending upon them. We're also left scratching our heads as to why Russian sex traffickers would want the hassle of nabbing American girls from MidWest metropolises rather than simply snatching teens from Russian villages, but I guess sex trafficking is the new Satanic panic, a moral scare that doesn't make much sense once you question its logistics.
Ayer is one of those directors who loves the action genre yet has never really displayed any proficiency within it. His action scenes are of the "shake the camera, cut quickly and hope for the best" variety. All of the set-pieces here take place in dimly lit rooms so as to disguise the fact that the movie's leading man is now the wrong side of 50 and no longer capable of the sort of beefcake ballet he displayed in the likes of the Transporter films. There's no impact to any of the action here, and we're forced to yearn for the days when movies like The Wild Bunch and Commando would have their over the top action finales play out in broad daylight, allowing us to actually bask in the bloody carnage.
Movies about men being plunged into an unfamiliar criminal underworld on a quest for justice work best when the hero is an out-of-depth everyman rather than an indestructible force of nature like Levon Cade. If the hero is always the scariest person in the room, even when surrounded by numerous gun-toting gopniks, it's difficult to develop any tension from such scenarios. We never feel like Levon if is in any sort of danger here. He might as well be Batman.
In the past, movies like this would always team the gruff male hero up with a sassy young woman who acts as a guide to the world he's trying to infiltrate (while often mocking his macho ideals). It's a trope that's sorely missed here. Watching Levon work alone isn't half as fun as seeing him trade quips with some reluctant sidekick.
You likely already know what you're going to get from A Working Man. It goes through the motions, but in a way that suggests everyone involved is simply clocking in and clocking out with little interest in the quality of their craft. A Working Man is no labour of love.
Directed by: David Ayer
Starring: Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Merab Ninidze, Maximilian Osinski, Cokey Falkow, Michael Peña, David Harbour
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