Reteaming with David Ayer after the refreshingly baffling The Beekeeper, Jason Statham is back as… A Working Man. Rory Doherty looks at what it adds to Statham’s impressive CV of onscreen employment.
He’s been a mechanic. A farmer. A beekeeper. A diver, a driver, a… transporter? With A Working Man, Jason Statham can now add construction foreman to his impressive CV.
In David Ayer’s righteous, ludicrous action flick, Statham plays Levon Cade, a former Green Beret who is forced to pick up guns and tactical gear to save his employer’s kidnapped college-age daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas).
For Cade, being a blue collar working man has its perks: stability, regular hours, multiple free lunches a day thanks to kind family members of his fellow employees. Like a typical action hero, Cade is reluctant to accept special treatment but nevertheless takes the edible gifts humbly and graciously.
Under this respectable guise, however, his inner cold-blooded avenger is champing at the bit to dispatch useless and opportunistic goons standing between him and Jenny’s traffickers. A Working Man is more straight-faced than Ayer and Statham’s recent collab, the refreshingly baffling The Beekeeper—the script, co-authored by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, feels like someone’s recollection of John Wick and Taken was poured into a Commando mould and peppered with the tics of 90s blockbuster action (everyone, no matter their importance to the story, gets weird personality affectations and wisecracks).
As A Working Man develops its depraved kidnapping conspiracy plot, it touches on a few reactionary, QAnon-adjacent themes: Cade is the brutal, ugly embodiment of “man who wants to protect women because he has a daughter”, which enforces the idea that gendered violence is best solved through a stronger, smarter thug purging bad people.
Statham-heads will remember that The Beekeeper ends with Statham performing a mini-January 6 on the President’s coastal residence in his pursuit of the tech “deep state”—an apt escalation for the delirious action film. When Ayer and Statham apply the same heightened, politically-harebrained reality to a trafficking plot that isn’t too far removed from the right-wing dog whistle thriller Sound of Freedom, the results are more confounding.
A Working Man’s biggest letdown relates to its title—Cade is happy to toss aside his construction-specific skills and tools as soon as he needs to resume his true, inner trained killer identity. Any attempts to emphasise the playful irony underpinning his character—this guy stops people living… for a living!—feel increasingly slight and immaterial every time a quirky crime boss or babbling, buffoonish henchman enters the fray.
The film tries to tap into an action hero’s desire for meaningful, even vulnerable human connection, which has been absent from the majority of Statham’s filmography (if he wants, he can be loyal, respectful, and a kind father). But all of these characterisation choices would sing a lot better if the script treated his blue-collar, manual labour profession as more than a façade to be dropped and replaced wholesale by a military pro identity.
This is not the first time an action film has made the mistake of making an in-hiding action hero return to their violent alter ego as easily as flicking a switch. Nobody stars Bob Odenkirk as a dreary accountant… who is actually a former mob enforcer with expert hand-to-hand combat and firearm training. The Accountant is also about an accountant, but this one has a lifetime of martial arts training and experience with criminal enterprises.
Despite their flaws, both these films play with the tension between “dull public-facing life” and “action movie fantasy life” in a more creative and exciting way than Ayer’s film. (A recent and universally-panned Ayer film was titled The Tax Collector—these trained killer action movies of his seem to follow a titling pattern.)
It’s not that we need to be genuinely surprised when a man who looks and talks like Jason Statham drops the pretence to deliver lethal blows (we are watching a Jason Statham movie, after all!) but the script focuses so much on a dull web of mob business that you will likely forget that the film’s initial gimmick is that this murderer had a normal job. When Statham picks up a sledgehammer during the climax (set, bizarrely, in a haunted house-esque criminal mansion), it feels so incidental that you may not realise it’s a reference to Levon’s familiarity with construction tools.
On reflection, being a construction foreman is probably too adjacent to being a bald-headed English assassin—both involve physical labour, constant risk assessments, and thinking strategically in your work—not to mention liaising with pig-headed, arrogant elites who ought to be humbled.
Maybe the missed opportunities of A Working Man would be less egregious if the director and star hadn’t just made a film about a beekeeping assassin, who reminds us just how strange and silly his secret identity is by repeating “Protect the hive” throughout the film. By contrast, A Working Man is frustratingly focused on all the least interesting parts of its story. Make Jason Statham wear a hard hat for the whole film or don’t bother.
