Monday, April 28, 2025

A Working Man: A Review in Two Parts

A Working Man

While the action beats are as solid as ever, the script's lack of focus prevents A Working Man from hitting Beekeeper highs.

Listen at the podcast providers of your choice.

A friend recently asked how/why Jason Statham keeps making movies. Or rather, how does he keep making variations on the same movie over and over again without folks getting sick of him. It's a question that came up because just a year after protecting the hive with The Beekeeper, Statham reunited with David Ayer to make another straight forward action-revenge movie called A Working Man. And the critical and box office results were...almost exactly the same as The Beekeeper. Fantastic. Let's ride this wave as long as we can. So today I'm going to do a dual review, first addressing why Jason Statham has been able to be an omnipresence in action movies for so long without audiences getting sick through the lens of this movie and then looking into the movie itself. Let's get punching!

The Setup

Statham stars as Levon Cade, a former Special Forces soldier who has turned to a more relaxed life of working construction and caring for his young daughter. But when a friend's daughter is kidnapped by a local criminal, Cade will tap into that lethal skill set to bring the girl home.

The Statham of It

A Working Man is a near perfect example of what makes Statham appealing from production, to setup and execution. So let's start with all of the stuff around the movies Statham makes. One of the smartest moves almost any modern movie star can make is to consistently put out movies, but not be omnipresent on social media. Especially if you're someone like Statham that plays a lot of variations on the same kind of character. 

I've seen a number of comparisons made between Statham and his Fast & Furious counterpart Dwayne Johnson and, in my opinion, this is a giant part of it. The Rock isn't just an actor. He's a brand. A brand with a carefully cultivated image that he historically hasn't wanted to adapt on screen that also keeps showing up everywhere. As fun as it is the first time you see a giant stack of pancakes on his feed for an "Epic Cheat Day" that well will run dry very quickly if you're also in your seventh starring role in 4 years where you're an impossibly strong man who's just the social media version the Rock on the big screen.

So even though Statham plays a bunch of action movie tough guys, but he's not on Instagram showing you his workout routine and seems mostly content to be quiet outside of the standard press tours. He also doesn't seem to take his image all that seriously indicated by his joke role in Spy and comments about how "you don't get Oscars for making Crank 2." 

That's the public image stuff. When it comes to the movie-making stuff, Statham is an action director's dream. First and foremost, he's not expensive. None of his movies had budgets that balloon into the stratosphere, so all of them can stay in the comfortable mid-budget range and spend most of their money on locations and action beats. Statham is also more than willing to do a lot of his own action, and by all accounts stays in fighting shape so he can perform as much of his fighting as possible. Which means a lot less cuts, a lot less stunt doubles, and less money being spent. If your lead actor can do action, it makes everything a lot easier.

So for A Working Man they can point to the success and relatively small budget of The Beekeeper and no one is worried about a Red One styled bomb in the making. And Statham will let the movie do the talking instead of saturating every bit of media with the latest action movie he made.

A Working Man also highlights an underrated aspect of Statham's on-screen persona. Statham has seemingly found the perfect medium between looking and feeling like an average man, while also being an action movie bad-ass. Honestly, the bald head and stubble do a lot of that work, as does his generally in shape, but not huge, size. And because Statham doesn't insist on flashing his physique, you can cover him up in flannel, a nice suit, or a uniform without batting an eye. His voice and accent work too because his accent isn't upper crust. It comes across as English working class tough (hence why Guy Ritchie has always liked using him). 

Put it all together and you've got someone who the audience knows can fight based on his film roles, while the man they see on screen is more or less unassuming. So when they throw Statham into a biker bar...he fits a lot better than a ton of other action actors. And you're not sick of his persona because he only does this about once a year and seems pretty self-deprecating or unconcerned about his public image.

A Working Man (The Main Review)

A lot of folks were, rightly in my opinion, excited about the possibility of another team-up between Statham and director David Ayer. While Ayer's films have always been hit or miss from me, he struck at something great in The Beekeeper. Because while that movie had very eighties sensibilities with Statham being a one man army who could get into the White House with ease, the action on screen was much more modern. Dunk it in a neon yellow glow and have Jeremy Irons do you exposition and you've got something.

By comparison A Working Man is a step down. Not a gigantic one, but a noticeable one. Why? There's a couple of reasons and I think most of them come down to the script, which was co-written by Sylvester Stallone.

One of the best things about The Beekeeper is that after its inciting incident it's basically a straight-forward revenge movie with Statham working his way up the food chain with progressively more ludicrous attacks. The villains of that movie caused harm to the only person he had a connection with and he makes them pay.

At the start, A Working Man appears to have a similar premise. Statham is a former Special Forces soldier trying to live a quiet life and maintain contact with his daughter after his wife's passing (more on this later). We're told that starting this quiet life was hard and that Michael Pena and his family were instrumental in this. So when Pena's daughter is snatched by a Russian gangster, he goes back to the old him and begins working his way up this Russian gangster food chain.

That should work right?

A lot of the time it does. Because Russian gangsters who traffic young girls are definitely in the category of "villains everyone can get behind our hero killing and torturing without mercy," and Ayer's enhanced approach to hand to hand combat is steady here. And as I've already alluded to, Statham is still a great guy for this kind of role.

I also really like the idea that his motivation is akin to settling a debt, since someone helped him in a way he couldn't help himself and now he's returning the favor. The stuff that doesn't work: plot diversions.

The movie has two major diversions that distract away from the central conflict. The first is Statham's daughter, whom he has limited custody of. The story is that his wife completed suicide and that primary custody fell to his father-in-law, who argues that Statham is too dangerous for the young girl to be around. A point that is proven 100% correct after his rescue mission puts the father-in-law and his daughter in the gangsters' crosshairs. Which begs the question...why is this here then? There's nothing that says he needs to be a father and the only conflict from this situation is keeping her safe (though she's never really in danger). And all these scenes add about 10-15 minuts of run time that could've been cut. He can be a dad sure, but this subplot with his dead ex-wife and the father-in-law's bitterness doesn't reinforce any themes or move the plot forward. It barely even escalates what Statham's character was already trying to do.

The second diversion is about how Statham tries to get in close with the gangsters which is by...trying to set up a drug deal through a biker gang? This makes a little more sense since his trail of leads goes dry and we need a "introduction fight" at one point, but this feels like a very roundabout way to storm a criminal compound. These are the bits that tend to end up in Stallone scripts because he feels a need to provide more backstory and character, even if it doesn't fit the story he's trying to tell.

Does that mean the movie is bad? Not really. It's more that the movie is more convuleted and messy than it needs to be and lacks the lean efficiency that makes a lot of great revenge-fueled action thrillers work. 

The Verdict: A Good, But Not Great Jason Statham Vehicle

While the action beats are as solid as ever, the script's lack of focus prevents A Working Man from hitting Beekeeper highs. 5/10

No comments:

Post a Comment