A Working Man should have phoned in sick.
After teaming up for last year’s surprise hit The Beekeeper, Ayer and The Stath get together again for another go around the well-worn revenge track. But even with Stallone lurking in the margins, lightning doesn’t strike twice. I like a movie that gets down to business as much as the next person but A Working Man ‘s foreplay is so perfunctory and, well, workmanlike that it inevitably rubs the audience up the wrong way and ends up letting us all down.
Based loosely – very loosely – on Chuck Dixon’s novel Levon’s Trade, A Working Man stars Statham as Levon Cade: ex-commando, widower, and a walking custody battle. He’s living in his truck to save legal fees while trying to win back custody of his daughter from a glowering Richard Heap, who plays his father-in-law-with-a-grudge and working as a construction foreman for Michael Peña’s Joe Garcia, whose daughter is abducted during a night out. With no ransom demand forthcoming, it’s clear that Garcia’s daughter has fallen foul to MAGA’s favourite bête noire du jour: people traffickers
A Working Man is the kind of movie that seems to think trafficking rings operate like Uber Eats, with rich, debauched oligarchs ordering from an all-you-can-snatch menu run as a side-hustle by various Russian gangsters, with every pub, club and alleyway a potential Taken sequel. Within a few short scenes, Cade’s snapping necks, dodging bullets and running afoul of the Russian mob led initially by Jason Flemyng doing his best “discount Dracula” impression as Wolo Kolisnyk, flanked by his nephews Danya and Vanko who dress like they’re Adidas-sponsored mascots for rival Pokémon editions. Sadly, Flemyng’s appearance is little more than a cameo as the Guy Ritchie alumni reunion gets crushed under the stampede of villains passing through the near side-scrolling beat-’em-up style plotting.
Ayer’s direction is not just lazy, it’s actively uninterested in stringing together a coherent plot in between its bruising set-pieces and so the action arrives in awkward bursts, interspersed with dialogue that runs the gamut between risible and redundant. The supporting cast feel for the most part like they appear in cut scenes, staying strictly in the ‘not actual game footage’ section of the movie. Peña’s role is largely that of Rhys Darby’s Nigel in Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, setting the quest in motion then offering tearful gratitude at the end while David Harbour shows up long enough to prove that, yes, he can wear sunglasses indoors and phone it in as a blind veteran whose character is set up intriguingly but ends up being this movie’s version of Peter Serafinowicz from John Wick 2.
Speaking of John Wick, A Working Man really, really wants to be a blue-collar, version of the Keanu Reeves franchise. In place of The High Table, we have the Bratva, a Costco Club Pack of interchangeably one-dimensional henchmen and oligarchs, most of whom seem to have decided to cosplay background characters from The Matrix in lieu of a personality (the writing and directing might be raw but the costume department absolutely cooked.) and possibly to distract from the failure of the UK locations to even remotely convince as Chicago where I seriously doubt the moon ever looks that big.
The real work is how bored Statham looks during his shift. For a man who once made fighting with a firehose look like ballet, this is depressingly mechanical. He growls, he punches, he scowls, and not once does he look like he’s enjoying himself. Given that he and Ayer are both credited producers – along with sixteen others – you’d think someone might’ve noticed they were sleepwalking through what should have been another slam-bang crowd-pleaser, although the decision to try making one of them by adapting as grim and dark a tale as Levon’s Trade in the first place suggests that nobody was putting in a good day’s work.
