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Indian Express
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
A Working Man movie review: Jason Statham switches jobs, not genre, in another grit-and-growl thriller
In a world where cinematic universes stretch thinner by the year and franchise fatigue lurks around every marquee, there is something oddly comforting about walking into a Jason Statham movie. You know what you're signing up for: tight T-shirts, tighter punches, and the occasional, gruffly-delivered one-liners. With A Working Man, Statham returns in full force, playing a salt-of-the-earth bruiser caught up in a web of crime. The film, directed by David Ayer and co-written with Sylvester Stallone, is exactly what you expect, but not quite enough of what you hope. Jason Statham has carved a corner in the action hero pantheon. If Tom Cruise is the daredevil philosopher-king of high-concept action, Statham is the neighbourhood tough guy who shows up with a steel-toed boot and unfinished business. He isn't chasing immortality or IMF conspiracies, he's just trying to live a quiet life. In A Working Man, his Levon Cade is a former special ops soldier-turned-construction worker who wants nothing more than to raise his daughter in peace. This setup–a reformed man drawn back into violence when someone he cares about is in danger–is as old as cinema itself. Indian audiences might recognise the echoes of Fateh in spirit, if not tone. What differentiates this film, at least superficially, is its attempt at grounding the story in a blue-collar milieu, perhaps a nod to Stallone's working-class roots. But the narrative, for all its grime and grit, never quite lets go of its glossy action-hero sheen. The core plot kicks off when Jenny, the daughter of Levon's boss (played by a surprisingly subdued Michael Peña), goes missing. Levon, reluctant but duty-bound, dives headfirst into the criminal underworld, unleashing a series of brutal takedowns that would make John Wick blink. The violence is visceral, the choreography functional but unremarkable. While there's a certain satisfaction in watching Statham bulldoze his way through goons, there's little inventiveness in the way it's all stitched together. Ayer, who previously gave us the bruising End of Watch and the scattershot Suicide Squad, brings a workmanlike quality to the direction here. The film never quite crackles, but it doesn't fumble either. The pacing is taut, but emotionally, A Working Man feels like a flatline punctuated by action beats. There's little room for levity, even less for introspection. This is a film that wants to be a character study but settles for a demolition derby. At the emotional core is Levon's relationship with his daughter, but it never evolves beyond the usual set of tropes. He's trying earnestly, if a bit mechanically, to build a life with her. He lives out of his car, brushing his teeth in a parking lot and curling up in the backseat at night. She, meanwhile, stays with her maternal grandfather, away from the chaos he's trying to escape. He sees her occasionally, makes sad eyes when he misses her, and carries the weight of guilt like a permanent shadow. You've seen it all before. These emotional beats are lifted from a playbook so dog-eared it might as well be laminated. It's time we acknowledged the Statham paradox. Here is a man whose physicality, screen presence, and fight IQ are nearly unmatched. He is, in many ways, Britain's answer to Tom Cruise. He commits, he trains, and he carries an entire film on sheer charisma. But unlike Cruise, who surrounds himself with filmmakers who constantly reinvent the action template, Statham seems to inhabit a creative cul-de-sac. His films rarely surprise. They function more as showcases for his durability than explorations of character or theme. There is no denying his appeal. He has a kind of anti-glamour charisma, an everyman edge that makes him a believable action hero. But watching A Working Man, one can't help but wish he were handed a script with more substance, or perhaps even allowed to stretch into roles that challenge his established persona. Until then, we get versions of the same film: different day, same fury. Michael Peña brings some pathos to a character that could easily have been a plot device. David Harbour shows up briefly, chews a bit of scenery, and disappears. The villains are cardboard cutouts, menacing only because the script tells us they are. There's a subplot involving human trafficking that feels clumsily handled; it is not offensive, but certainly lacking nuance. One moment you're watching a girl being held captive, and the next you're in a barroom brawl scored like it's the third act of a superhero movie. Tonal consistency is not the film's strong suit. And perhaps that's the real frustration with A Working Man. It's not that it's bad. It's that it never dares to be better. The ingredients are there: a leading man with gravitas, a director with a flair for grit, a story with emotional potential. But somewhere between concept and execution, ambition is traded for reliability. A Working Man A Working Man Cast – Jason Statham, Michael Peña, David Harbour, Jason Flemyng A Working Man Director – David Ayer A Working Man Rating – 2/5
Chicago Tribune
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘A Working Man' review: Jason Statham solves a Chicago sex trafficking problem
Jason Statham's latest thriller 'A Working Man' is 'Taken,' if 'Taken' took place in Chicago and Joliet and their environs. For those who don't live in the area, Joliet is a 45-minute or so drive southwest of Chicago, depending on traffic. 'A Working Man' imagines an insidious sex trafficking network run by Russian mobsters in very silly tracksuits, whose owners clearly are just asking for it. What is 'it'? 'It' is Statham. Based on the book 'Levon's Trade,' the first of 12 Chuck Dixon novels, this overripe exercise in vigilante slaughter casts Stathan as Royal Marines veteran Levon Cade, now working as a construction foreman for a family-run company. Levon is up against it, life-wise. He's fighting to retain co-parenting custody of his daughter, he's sleeping in his car and he's struggling to keep a lid on his most violent impulses, without which, of course, there would be no movie. In the line of duty, he has killed plenty; his American wife committed suicide prior to the film's timeline, while he was away. It's a lot for one person to shoulder, but in this realm of action fantasy, there's only so much emotional realism allowed. In 'A Working Man,' when someone encourages Levon to work through his probable post-traumatic stress disorder, it's practically a laugh line and treated as dismissible woke nonsense. The screenplay adaptation comes from Sylvester Stallone and director David Ayer, and it has a sure sense of what Statham's audience wants and doesn't want. In the previous Ayer/Statham meetup 'The Beekeeper,' the star took on online scam artists and massive political corruption; in 'A Working Man,' it's sex trafficking. When the daughter (Arianna Rivas) of Statham's weak, indulgent boss (Michael Peña) is abducted, it's up to Levon, his scowl and his dazzling combat skills to save this surrogate daughter, while securing his relationship with his own daughter (Isla Gie). Once abducted, the Rivas character falls out of the movie for a long while. There's too much killing to do to accommodate her. Stabbing, impaling, shooting and neck-snapping his way from Chicago to Joliet, Levon leaves 50-plus bodies (of Russians and Latinos, mostly) strewn all over the Land of Lincoln as he uncovers the sorry depths of Russian mob corruption. This includes cops on the take and a Joliet roadhouse drug dealer (Chidi Ajufo) who livens things up. Levon goes undercover as a meth customer as part of his rescue mission. During Statham's entertaining initial scene with Ajufo — the movie has its moments, and a few diverting blurs of fast-cut mayhem — we get the line we've been waiting for, delivered by Ajufo's Mr. Big, a man who outfits his German biker helmet with enormous stag horns. In the bar, he regards Levon, who one of the baddies suspects is undercover law enforcement. Looking at Statham's mitts, Ajufo says: 'You ain't a cop.' (Pause, camera zips in for a close-up.) 'You're a working man. ' Director Ayer may have hit the bloody sweet spot more engagingly in 'The Beekeeper,' but you can't say he's not trying things here. Visually, 'A Working Man' flips from absurd stylization (love that Joliet roadhouse, which looks gaudy enough for Caligula) to handheld faux-realism and back again. Several points in the climax have a comically enormous full moon serving as backdrop. As arguments for vigilante justice go, this one appears likely to lead to a sequel or three — and unless the filmmakers are dolts, they'll jolly well bring back Gunny, the blind combat vet with a devotion to archery, so drolly underplayed by David Harbour. Running time: 1:56 How to watch: Premieres in theaters March 28
Los Angeles Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘A Working Man,' Jason Statham's tools are hammers, guns and fists
'A Working Man' opens with a batty pastiche of bullets and buzz saws, parachutes and cranes. A soldier's corpse rests under an American flag. A cement mixer trundles toward a construction site. There's something modestly affecting (and complicated) about the career arc of a contractor named Levon Cade (Jason Statham) who once blew up buildings and now erects them, although as a Veterans Day commercial for a hardware store, the montage would be slightly over the top. Director David Ayer is trying to weld a connection between last year's surprise delight 'The Beekeeper,' in which Statham played an assassin turned hive master, and this one, in which he plays an ex-soldier who's handy with a hammer. Of these two thrillers, honey turns out to be funnier than hard hats. 'A Working Man' strikes an unsteady balance between solemn and ridiculous. The set-up is that sex traffickers have taken the 19-year-old daughter of Levon's bosses Joe and Carla (Michael Peña and Noemi Gonzalez). Statham stays straight-faced through Levon's bloody quest to get her back, even at it takes him to places that make 'pizzagate' look reasonable: a nightclub with fire jugglers, a backwoods speakeasy gilded like 'The Great Gatsby' and a biker bar decorated by hundreds of human skulls and a throne fused from chrome tailpipes. The production and costume designers are having a blast. Even an outdoor scene is lit by a moon so large and low, Levon could drive a tank through it. Maybe they're saving his space adventures for a sequel. Levon meets and murders a wacky goon squad that sports everything from vampire chic to chain-metal capelets. Besides one brawl inside a speeding van, the actual fights aren't that interesting; we're mostly enjoying the clothes. 'I am the big potatoes,' one creep (Maximilian Osinski) preens in a lace cowboy hat and ruffled sleeves. We're somewhere in Illinois but he looks like he just escaped an asylum in Versailles. No one in the film comments on any of the frippery. Ayer is simply bedazzling a script that would otherwise feel rudimentary had it starred Liam Neeson in a gray T-shirt. In the movie's source material, the 2014 novel 'Levon's Trade' (the first of Chuck Dixon's 12 testosterone-drenched Levon Cade books), the weirdest outfit belongs to a brute wearing 'the last Members Only jacket on Earth.' At its foundation, the movie is a hoary cliché with quirk spackled on it. The construction-worker conceit is dropped faster than a stack of bricks. There's a fight right up at the top where Levon swings a bucket of nails into a gangster's face, and after that, his character defaults to his special-ops training: He can't wait to get to waterboarding. Levon drowns one goon, then another and two more. Too bad the title 'Aquaman' was already taken. The project dates back to before the buzz about the bees. Sylvester Stallone previously tried adapting Dixon's paperback franchise for TV and is credited as a co-writer alongside Ayer. I appreciate the tweaks they've made to the book. (Letting female characters talk, for one.) Ayers made his bones with the streetwise LAPD drama 'Training Day,' winning Denzel Washington a lead actor Oscar, and he refuses to take the vigilante genre seriously. Rather, he takes this kind of fear-mongering Fox News dreck as seriously as it deserves — as silly fiction. 'A Working Man' molds the Levon character to Statham, making him a British soldier and tilting the book's axis of evil away from ' 'Merica good, everyone else bad.' After 22 years of service doing secret, ghastly things — he keeps his military actions classified — Levon is now in Chicago with PTSD (a condition that gets mentioned once), a dead American wife and a grade-school kid who the courts have decided should live with Levon's rich father-in-law, Dr. Roth (Richard Heap). Although he's supposed to be a stuffy neurosurgeon, Dr. Roth wears furry bucket hats and yoga pants. Perhaps the script meant to write 'Dennis Rodman.' The self-serious first stretch of the film drags as it establishes that Levon is a righteous dude who sleeps in his pick-up truck to save cash for his custody battle. It's a shame the muscle man isn't invited to carry his share of the comedy. It's also unnecessary. Anyone who likes this kind of pulp knows these avenging angel characters are more or less the same: intense, taciturn, minimalist. If Levon has a tick, it's his impatience to get on with the murdering. He offs bad guys with comically little fuss, sometimes before he gets much information out of them. His key strategy seems to be using dead bodies as duck decoys, hunting whoever cares about his latest corpse. As his best pal Gunny (David Harbour) says, 'You killed your way into this — you'll have to kill your way out.' I dug Arianna Rivas' Jenny, the kidnapped coed who plays an active role in her own rescue. Jenny's hobbies include spreadsheets, karate and piano. (She plays 'Moonlight Sonata' so often that composer Jared Michael Fry works it into the score.) Jenny also claims to know how to break fingers, although we never see that party trick. Though the character strains credulity, Rivas plays her with aplomb. The build-up to her abduction is oddly adorable: Jenny and her college girlfriends go out dressed in a group costume of skirt-suits and pearls — they're cosplaying as political wives? — and then do cheerleading routines on a dance floor. Frivolous as it is, these inventive details convince us that Ayer isn't simply phoning it in. The bad guys are cannon fodder, though I did like the way one mobster sadly sighs at a grenade before he explodes. Kudos to the casting team for hiring actors with interesting faces — Max Croes, Cokey Falkow and Andrej Kaminsky are now engraved in my memory — and I couldn't help developing a soft spot for Chidi Ajufo's Dutch, a fellow veteran whose memorable bits of business include drinking from a comically small teacup and feeding us the movie's title: 'You're not a cop, you're a working man.' Dutch also merits the film's second-most poignant exit. The most emotional goes to a gun that's given a full military salute. Ayer knows what his audience wants and he's willing to give it to them. He's a working man, too, but at least his product is custom-crafted.
Telegraph
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A Working Man: Jason Statham is wasted in Sylvester Stallone's humourless slaughterfest
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
Boston Globe
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Jason Statham delivers the action goods in ‘A Working Man' — for the most part
Though he appears to have no other relatives, Levon is treated like family by his boss, Joe Garcia (Michael Peña), and his wife, Carla (Noemi Gonzalez). To make sure he gets at least one good meal a day, Carla sends their daughter, Jenny (Arianna Rivas), to the latest construction site with food for Levon. So far, this adaptation of Chuck Dixon's novel 'Levon's Trade' has the makings of a small, bittersweet story of fathers and daughters. But the trade in Dixon's title isn't mixing cement or riding steel beams. Levon has a secret past, and because he's played by Jason Statham, you know that past contains ultra-violence. Turns out Levon is quite adept at tapping kegs of whup-ass, as evidenced in an early scene where he comes to the defense of a work colleague being beaten by thugs at the site. Levon uses buckets of nails, bags of concrete, his fists and feet, and the perpetrators' guns to restore law and order. Advertisement From left, Arianna Rivas, Michael Peña, and Jason Statham in "A Working Man." Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios/Dan Smith Jenny is impressed and correctly guesses that Levon has a military background. He's a British ex-Royal Marines commando. Levon swears Jenny to secrecy. 'It's not who I am anymore,' Levon says. As you can guess, some horrible event will make him change his mind. After Jenny and her girlfriends use fake IDs to enter a club to celebrate their high-school graduation, she is kidnapped by human traffickers Viper (Emmett J. Scanlan) and Artemis (Eve Mauro). Joe begs Levon for help — as the son of a Marine, he immediately recognizes Levon as ex-military — but is initially turned down. Once Levon takes the assignment, director David Ayer unleashes the torrent of graphic violence you paid good money to see. In the melee, we're subject to an overly complicated plot involving drugs, the Russian Mafia, and hit men, who dress in outlandish suits that look like clown costumes designed by Yves Saint Laurent. All roads lead to Dimi (Maximilian Osinski), the son of a made Mafioso who thinks he's a capo but is really a klutz. Advertisement 'A Working Man' was initially pitched by co-writer Sylvester Stallone David Harbour, left, and Jason Statham in "A Working Man." Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios/Dan Smith At the top of that list is Gunny (David Harbour), Levon's former partner and the reason he retired. Gunny is blind, but can shoot an arrow close enough to nearly miss Levon when he comes to visit. He's like the Though she's offscreen for most of the carnage, Jenny is far from a damsel in distress. Every man to whom she is sold doesn't get far enough to molest her. One of the guys ends up needing 36 stitches. Her annoying captors, Viper and Artemis, are dangerous but hapless. And the old cliché of being saved by the sudden appearance of a cop is turned into a dark running joke when the same officer keeps showing up to help the villains instead. I've said this whenever I've reviewed a Jason Statham movie: I find him more interesting in his non-action scenes than when he's blowing bad guys to smithereens. This film is no different. I've witnessed 27 million scenes of people being pumped full of lead (this movie probably counts for about 1 million of those), but far fewer moments when characters in action films relate to each other. Advertisement Isla Gie and Jason Statham in "A Working Man." Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios Unlike most action-movie actors, Statham is very good at conveying camaraderie with dialogue. His scenes with Gie made me want to know more about their relationship. I felt the same way about his scenes with Harbour. Director Ayer also helmed Statham's 2024 hit, 'The Beekeeper,' and Stallone wrote the actor's 2013 film 'Homefront.' If you liked those movies, you'll probably enjoy this one. As much fun as 'A Working Man' can be, I kept thinking there's a better movie peeking out through the cracks of this rather OK one. ★★½ A WORKING MAN Directed by David Ayer. Written by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone. Starring Jason Statham, David Harbour, Arianna Rivas, Michael Peña, Emmett J. Scanlan, Eve Mauro, Maximilian Osinski, Isla Gie, Noemi Gonzalez. At AMC Boston Common, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, AMC Causeway, suburbs. 116 minutes. R (the violence gets time and a half) Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe's film critic.
