Yahoo Lifestyle ‘A Working Man’ Review: Jason Statham’s Blue Collar Barely Hides Character’s Commando Roots in Routine Vigilante Bruiser
Jason Statham is good at his job, which explains why he keeps booking the same kinds of movies — well, that and the fact that people keep watching them. Reuniting the British action star with “The Beekeeper” writer-director David Ayer, “A Working Man” makes the least effort yet to provide backstory or motive before sending Statham’s latest character, Levon Cade, on a spectacularly violent rampage. Statham’s responsibility here is to make the Royal Marines veteran turned Chicago construction foreman look experienced enough to do serious damage, without directly repeating the dozen other movies in which he’s done so already.
Statham plays the “reluctant” vigilante, putting aside his uniquely lethal skill set for a respectable job and shared custody of his young daughter (Isla Gie), which isn’t so easy while living out of a rented pickup truck. Before the trouble starts, Levon is beloved by all, with co-workers bringing him homemade meals and his boss, Joe Garcia (Michael Peña), giving the troubled ex-commando a chance to go straight. Then Joe’s college-age daughter, Carla (Noemi Gonzalez), is abducted by Russian goons while out celebrating her first semester in business school. It’s not his daughter, but Levon furrows that glorious brow of his and swears to do whatever it takes to bring her home — even if, it turns out, Carla is resourceful enough, she may not even need his help.
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The only real surprise here is learning that “A Working Man” was adapted from a novel. “Levon’s Trade” is the first in a terse 12-book series by Chuck Dixon, which comes with the line “Levon is bad ass. Makes Jack Reacher seem like a crossing guard” on the back cover — a blurb with no source, expressed with roughly the same grammatical finesse as Dixon’s prose. Screenplay credit goes to Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, which makes sense. This is the kind of character Stallone made popular in the 1980s, when critics pushed back on the one-man-army archetype, but box office won out, to the point that people now feel nostalgic for Stallone’s dumbed-down moral code. Here we get “Sound of Freedom” as a second-tier Jason Statham movie.
Will audiences tire of this schtick? If anything, this is closer to what moviegoers want than eight of the 10 films recently nominated for best picture (the “Dune” sequel and “Wizard of Oz” prequel were hits, but the other finalists, not based on familiar formulas or IP, failed to engage the American public). Meanwhile, action will always be in demand, and the actors who can pull it off are in short supply these days.
Obscenely built Dwayne Johnson has essentially assumed the Schwarzenegger mantle, Nicolas Cage still fields the wacky sci-fi stuff, and Liam Neeson has the mad-dad/elder-assassin field covered. But now that Bruce Willis has mercifully been allowed to retire, bald, bullet-headed Statham (who’s been cranking out variations on the same role since 2002’s “The Transporter”) is all the more appealing as the gruff skull-cracker. Among “The Expendables,” Statham was the little guy. Here, the compact yet powerful bruiser’s professional training and quick thinking give him the advantage over bigger and better-armed adversaries, turning anything, from a bucket of nails to a stray sledgehammer, into a deadly weapon.
For those who remember Statham’s screen debut — square-jawed and already free of follicles in “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” — it’s amusing to see the humor dialed down to a knowing smirk or well-timed grunt, even if the scripts now lack Guy Ritchie’s verbal wit (it was Ritchie who gave the star his last great film in cash-truck heist movie “Wrath of Man”). “A Working Man” sees Statham reunited with Jason Flemyng; his fellow “Lock Stock” vet plays one of the many shady Russian oligarchs Levon goes up against in his methodical, brute-force search for Carla.
Levon starts with the bartender at the club where Carla disappeared, but his interrogation techniques prove somewhat lacking. It’s intimidating enough to see someone waterboarded in his own bathtub or tied up and suspended over his private pool, but Levon’s sources keep dying during questioning, complicating his investigation. It’s implied that before going into construction, Levon had brought his military training into civilian life in some shady (though likely heroic) capacity or another — maybe even kidnap recovery.
But those actions have a steep cost, as former comrade Gunny Leffertz (David Harbour) reminds him. Gunny lost his sight in a mission with Levon, but still encourages his friend to accept this assignment, sending contradictory messages in a movie that isn’t genuinely interested in exploring the consequences of Levon’s behavior. Clearly, Ayer and company are establishing the foundation for a potential franchise, with a small crew of supporting characters who could come back if Ayer wants to return to the two Russians conspicuously left standing at the end of “A Working Man.”
This wasn’t how I envisioned Ayer’s career shaping up. For a time, he struck me as an important voice, someone who immersed himself in the language and culture of urban crime (evident in his early scripts for “Training Day” and the original “The Fast and the Furious”) and brought a credible, crackling authenticity to his projects. A few of his movies are very good — namely, “End of Watch” and “Fury,” and I’ll go to my grave defending “Bright” — but it increasingly feels like he’s recycling old plots, the way straight-to-tape action movies did in the late 20th century.
Ayer works with bigger budgets and more established stars, but the Ayer-Statham dynamic represented by “The Beekeeper” and “A Working Man” is at best the blue-collar version of what Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie have been doing across multiple projects, including that old crossing guard yarn, “Jack Reacher.” Today’s top action stars know their niche and develop projects that play to their strengths (take the rule Johnson required of his creative collaborators: “The Rock don’t do romance”). In Statham’s case, it makes for a consistent if somewhat limited oeuvre — one that keeps him working, churning out carnage for undiscriminating fans.
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