Director David Ayer and action legend Jason Statham unite to make a film that unravels into insanity minute-by-minute.
For the first 45 minutes or so of A Working Man, I wasn’t entirely sure if I was going to end up writing about it. The movements it was making felt sluggish and without any sense of velocity, a low energy action programmer that has littered the direct-to-video space for decades. Despite the strange pedigree of the film (a new David Ayer film, from a script co-written by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, based on a novel written by right-wing comic book scribe Chuck Dixon,) it was giving me basically nothing to really center myself on other than how dull it all was.
Then that second half of the movie hit, and things went so wildly off the rails that I wasn’t entirely sure I was still watching the same film. What was at first a buttoned up, humorless horror story about the lurking threat of human trafficking spiraled into a recklessly violent riff somewhere between John Wick and the Punisher. New characters were introduced, namelessly, in costuming that threw the whole film off its axis. The film’s sense of morality seemed to devolve into a 12-year-olds sense of the coolest imagery it could conjure. It didn’t elevate what was a slog of a sub-De Palma crime thriller into something good per say, but it did at least become interesting. Everyone involved have made crazier projects (Ayer’s Suicide Squad is one of the most unhinged pieces of mainstream entertainment,) but rarely has a film convinced you it was totally normal, only to rugpull quite so brazenly.
A Working Man focuses on Levon Cade (Jason Statham, in familiar territory,) a former Royal Marine special forces agent who now works in construction in Chicago. A widower, Levon struggles to make ends meet, as well as finding himself in a seemingly unending custody battle with his dead wife’s father for his daughter. He does however have a close relationship with his employer Joe (Michael Pena, atypically restrained) and his family, including his college-aged daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas.)
So when Jenny is kidnapped, Levon is called upon to find her. Initially reluctant due to concerns about utilizing his more violent nature, Levon eventually determines he has to do something. Thus commences his one-man mission to recover Jenny and return her home. Soon enough he discovers Jenny’s disappearance has connections with the Russian mob, and all the baggage that comes from that.
In many ways, Levon’s mission causes him to delve deeper and deeper into an organized crime underworld that becomes more bananas the deeper he goes. Initially he encounters low level bar-front drug lords; by the end his is dealing with Matrix cosplayers with mini machine guns and crazed expressions. At one point he bribes his way into the backroom of a rural cowboy bar, and has to go hunting through the forest to find a secret underground location, all of which is meant to be within driving distance of Chicago?
In essence, A Working Man is a film that promises one thing (a grounded thriller) and unravels into something else entirely (ultraviolent cartoon nonsense). The former is painfully dull, and the latter is so unhinged it bends towards self-parody. It also feels deliriously old-school, with its Russian bad guys who mostly speak to each other in English, unapologetic gun fetishism, and unambiguously pro-vigilante politics. It isn’t a film that just asks you to turn your brain off. It is a film that will make you wonder if your brain is actively fleeing your head.
