Review: "A Working Man"

Jason Stathem has had a successful career as an action hero.  His credits include The Transporter trilogy (beginning in 2002), The Italian Job (2003), The Expendables trilogy (beginning in 2010), the two Mechanicmovies (2011 and 2016) and a handful of the Fast and Furious franchise films.

Along with Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme, he has carved out a spot in the minds of action film junkies everywhere.  He’s that unstoppable action hero who we love to see.  He’s essentially the same character in every one of his movies.  And that’s just fine with his fans.

He’s that smiling, fighting machine with the shaved head, rugged good looks, and an arsenal of martial arts moves.  His driving skills are impressive (he was a race car driver in real life) and he’s pretty handy with just about any gun you put in his hands. 

He’s not so much a romantic kind of guy, as much as someone who can take out a small army of thugs and killers in a matter of minutes without breaking a sweat or running short of breath.  He’s cool.

In A Working Man, he’s a construction worker named Levon—a man with a dark past.  That past includes some extensive military service and training that he’d prefer to keep under wraps.  His violent past jeopardizes his relationship with his young daughter Merry, who has become his responsibility following the passing of his wife. 

His violent temper and ability to hurt and kill people have earned him the label of a bad dad.  His spiteful father-in-law would like nothing better than to take custody of Merry, though she loves her blue-collar father as much as he loves her.

Levon is a likeable construction foreman who considers his boss’s family his own.  When the boss’s college age daughter is kidnapped by Russian mobsters, he reluctantly agrees to reboot his former military skills to find her and bring her back.

It’s a righteous mission which pretty much gives Levon Carte Blanche in dealing with the ruthless Russians.  A Working Man’s gotta do what a Working Man’s gotta do.

In this case, it’s a lot of brutal fighting, stabbing, shooting and blowing things up. A Working Man is a violent movie by design. 

Sylvester Stallone was one of the screenwriters of A Working Man.  Say what you will about Sly Stallone, but he’s a man who knows what audiences like.  I’m referring to the Rocky franchise as well as the Rambo series, as a sample of his impressive 43 writing credits listed on IMBD.

His co-writer was David Ayer who also directed the film.  Ayer’s previous credits include: Fury, starring Brad Pitt (2014), and Suicide Squad, starring Will Smith, Jared Leto and Margot Robbie (2016).

Sadly, A Working Man falls below the expectations set by any of the movies of any of the aforementioned cast or crew.

For Statham, it lacks the slickness and polish of movies like his Transporter films. A Working Man appears to be a much lower budget film, with a cranked out, stamped out, formula screenplay that seems content to just connect the dots and check all the boxes that define action movies like this.

There is the requisite number of fight scenes as well as the required high body count that people pay to see.  Overall, the movie doesn’t raise the bar when it comes to creativity or imagination.  Case in point, here is yet another a movie in which the bad guys are all incredibly bad shots, never hitting or grazing the hero during any of the sustained exchanges of gunfire. 

Does Levon rescue the girl in the end?  You might as well ask: Is the Pope Catholic?  Or, do bears go to the bathroom in the woods?  There is never any doubt.

A Working Man is a snort of violent, bloody, guilty pleasure entertainment, for action movie junkies who crave a flick like this from time to time, and never get enough of Jason Statham, even if we’ve seen him do this character dozens of times.

Like Liam Neeson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, nobody cares.  He’s a likeable guy, and we just like to see him up there on the big screen, even as a butt-kicking construction worker. 

Hey—sue me!