A Hardly Working Man
When I first heard the premise of A Working Man—Jason Statham vs. Human Traffickers—I thought it might be a Statham-ized version of Sound of Freedom, albeit not so QAnon-adjacent. That’s not the case, it’s much weirder than that. And not in a good way. A Working Man is an adaptation of Chuck Dixon’s Levon’s Trade series of books. Like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, it’s about a badass military veteran who’s a homeless drifter, occasionally called upon to fight bad guys.
A year ago, Statham teamed up with director David Ayer on The Beekeeper, an entertaining thriller. Now, the star and director are reunited, and it’s much less of a success, due to lackluster action, a convoluted plot, and a strange, inconsistent tone. Statham plays Levon, introduced working as a construction foreman under his boss (Michael Pena). When the boss’ daughter (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped Taken-style by a group of traffickers, Pena turns to his ass-kicking employee, who gets some help from his blind wartime buddy (David Harbour) in obtaining enough shotguns to go toe-to-toe with the entire Chicago Russian underworld, as well as an allied biker gang.
It’s the usual Statham premise, where his military background means this man in his late-50s can successfully kick the asses of just about anyone, whether they’re bigger than him, younger than him, or more numerous than him. It’s shot, in the usual Ayer fashion, very poorly, with incoherent, shaky cam-dependent combat scenes.
A Working Man was co-written by Ayer along with Sylvester Stallone; Stallone was trying to build a TV series around the character more than 20 years ago. Perhaps it’ll go the way of Amazon’s Reacher, where a TV adaptation years from now is much better than the movie version. This movie features a version of sex trafficking in which criminal organizations abduct beautiful women from Chicago nightspots, where they’re sold as sex slaves to creepy local men. This supposedly happens all the time, except that we’re told, in one line of dialogue, that “the cops don’t care about this sort of case—they just file a report and forget about it.” But when the beautiful 19-year-old daughter of a prominent businessman gets kidnapped from a nightclub in a major city, that’s something the cops care about, and the media, too.
Credit’s due, though, for not making the daughter a pure damsel in distress; she get more traits—she’s in business school at 19, is a concert pianist, and knows karate—than is typical of that sort of character.
The Beekeeper started as a small, contained story of Statham going to war with telemarketing scammers before slowly expanding into a wider tale involving the CIA, various other government agencies, and eventually the family of the president of the United States. A Working Man is much messier. You need an organizational chart to follow the relationships among the movie’s Russian mobsters, as there are about 10 different characters. That leads to another of the film’s baffling choices: this is a somber story, of kidnapping and sex trafficking, but the characters wear ludicrous, garish costumes, to the point where it’s distracting.
Come for the Russian henchmen with the color-coordinated tracksuits, and stay for the trafficking john who’s dressed like the old WWF villain Mr. Fuji. Even the father of Statham’s late wife, for whom he’s battling for custody of his daughter, is introduced wearing a floppy pimp hat at a child’s birthday party. Also, like The Beekeeper, A Working Man is set in the United States, with endless establishing shots around Chicago, but was shot in the U.K. The setting also places Statham within easy driving distance of his foes, when in real-life the sex-trafficking conspiracy, much like the scammers in The Beekeeper, probably would’ve been based in a foreign country.