A Working Man: Jason Statham is wasted in Sylvester Stallone's humourless slaughterfest

Telegraph

26-03-2025

A Working Man is a promisingly self-parodic title for a Jason Statham flick, since it basically describes them all. The Transporter? The Mechanic? The Beekeeper? 'Bloke with job' is the whole Statham brand.
Scratch beneath the ostensible profession – here, we're talking construction – and we always get a shadowy backstory. It tends to entail mercenary credentials or black ops, and has made him hard as nails. Put it this way: if there's one fellow who could march around Chicago's building sites without even bothering with a hard hat, it's Statham's Levon Cade.
You'd think any old script would do, but A Working Man proves otherwise. The film was produced and co-written by Sylvester Stallone – too old for Rambo killing sprees himself by now, but not to knock off cloyingly earnest dialogue on demand. ('I hurt, too,' Levon gruffly tells his tweenage daughter when the subject of her late 'mom' comes up.)
Levon faces a Taken-style dilemma when his young colleague Jenny (Arianna Rivas), whose parents (Michael Peña, Noemí González) are his paymasters, is trafficked into sex slavery on a night out. It's been years since he last buckled up on a mission: 'That's not who I am any more,' he explains, before any such scruples vanish in a nanosecond and he goes after the culprits, depraved Russian mafiosi adhering to the so-called 'vory v zakone' code of criminal conduct.
What we get henceforth is just your standard grim-faced beat-em-up, barely leavened with a sense of humour, unless you count Jason Flemyng's flamboyant kingpin (first line: 'Vhat em I dyoooing hia??') and David Harbour as a blind weapons expert who has a cache of machine guns lifted directly from Saddam's palace.
The fetishising of military hardware, as ever with director David Ayer (Fury, Suicide Squad) is absolutely shameless – the entire opening credits sequence is straight-up war porn. The film uses its human-trafficking angle as an alibi for generic slaughter, while inevitably refusing to delve into the ramifications of that theme, especially for Jenny, a cipher of a character it tries to pretend is no damsel.
It's never that deep: Statham just pulverises dozens of goons, many with his bare fists, though he also enjoys the Bluetooth scope Harbour has custom-fitted to an M14, which lets him target baddies he doesn't even have eyes on.
Companionable as he always is, the way this flaunts Statham's star power leaves a lot to be desired. He's a totem of meathead carnage, barely sustains a scratch, and doesn't get nearly enough moments of the deadpan bemusement he excels at best.
The existence of 11 books in the same series by Chuck Dixon is concerning, particularly if Ayer stays attached and the franchise takes off, like The Equalizer did for Denzel Washington. Statham should be for us all, not just angry dads with NRA memberships.
15 cert, 116 min. In cinemas from March 28