An ex-Royal Marine turned construction worker calls on his skills when
his boss implores him to find his kidnapped daughter.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Ayer
Starring: Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Merab Ninidze, Maximilian Osinski, Cokey Falkow, Michael
Peña, David Harbour
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.
A Working Man is in UK/ROI
cinemas from March 28th.
