Review by C.J. Bunce
For anyone looking for your annual fix of Jason Statham, the actor and action star delivered this year with his latest tough guy role. In A Working Man he plays Levon Cade, a former British soldier and now construction worker in the States. Cade just wants to be left alone, and he’s become practically family to the family-run construction business led by Michael Peña where he’s willing to help an employee being beaten by loan sharks. But when the boss’s daughter is taken by a Russian gang to be trafficked off to some wealthy pervert, it’s time for Cade to use some of his dormant skills to get her back. What transpires is Statham in something less than Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer but somehow more believable in the role than Liam Neeson in The Taken series.
A Working Man is now streaming on Prime Video.
Fuqua certainly has created a high bar with Denzel Washington working has way up to killing off the top bad guy in three movies featuring “The Equalizer” Robert McCall. Unfortunately this script by Training Day and The Fast and the Furious’s David Ayer and Sylvester Stallone isn’t as compelling or gritty, and the direction by Ayer doesn’t come close to the action and suspense of Fuqua’s trilogy.
But Stallone and Ayer pull in enough tropes that you’ll probably stick around until the end. That’s because Statham is so earnest as this guy he plays in every other role. In fact if you stitched all the movies he’s made that aren’t The Expendables, The Meg, or The Fast and the Furious, you would end up with Statham as something like Bill Bixby’s David Banner in The Incredible Hulk. Statham’s heroes always have a violent past and always show up to protect someone with the help of some physical strength, like Banner, like The Punisher. In many ways every Statham movie is another superhero movie because Hollywood knows how to use Statham to put on a good show.
Peña’s role as Cade’s boss is not much more than a cameo, but his daughter Jenny Garcias (played by Black Phone 2’s Arianna Rivas) gets more as the kidnap victim. She doesn’t just curl up, but she takes action against her assailants, enough to break free. It’s a good twist on the character we’ve seen before in Statham’s Transporter movies. David Harbour’s role is also slight. He plays Cade’s former soldier comrade in arms, who was partially blinded because of some mistake by Cade.
The rest of the cast is a slate of bad guys, all who participated in the kidnapping plot, from the two main abductors and antagonists (played by Emmett Scanlan as Viper and Eve Mauro as Artemis), to two gaudy clad Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum track suit mafia types (played by Greg Kolpakchi and Piotr Witkowski), to two higher level thugs (played by Ricky Champ as Nestor and Max Croes as Karp), to the bartender who allows the abductions (played by David Witts), to Dutch (played by Chidi Adufo) a biker gang leader with a Game of Thrones chair, to Dimi (played by Maximilian Osinski) a Jesus-looking mid-level kingpin, to three other high and higher ranked Russian mob types (played by Merab Ninidze, Jason Flemyng, and Andrej Kaminsky). I’m not sure the audience needs to keep track of who is who. The point is this is Statham as Cade, plucking them off one by one as he gets closer to rescuing the princess–I mean the boss’s daughter. It also has some surprise government corruption thrown in for good measure.
But Statham fans are mostly here for the action, right? His fans won’t be disappointed in the ways he can kill a deserving creep, from drowning to knifing to neck snapping, heads cracking on counters, to the bullet in the head. It’s all here.
It’s always a good time for another Statham movie. Reaching back to Statham’s cool and cocky bravado under director John Carpenter in Ghosts of Mars, he next led the first of his three Transporter movies beginning in 2002, then he co-starred in two of the best heist movies of all time with 2003’s The Italian Job, followed by 2008’s The Bank Job. He’s co-starred in The Fast and the Furious, The Expendables, and The Meg franchises, played Donald E. Westlake’s well-known crime lead in Parker, and starred in a dozen other single-word action flicks, including Collateral, Cellular, Revolver, Snatch, Crank, Safe, and Redemption, with The Beekeeper and Fast X his latest hits. Carpenter is relevant here because his character in A Working Man looks a lot like Roddy Piper’s tough guy lead in Carpenter’s sci-fi classic They Live. Alas, no sci-fi in this movie, however.
Wait no further. From Amazon/MGM, catch A Working Man now streaming on Prime Video.
