By Jake Wilson
A WORKING MAN ★★
(MA), 116 minutes
There are two ways viewers are invited to think of Levon Cade (Jason Statham), the hero of A Working Man, based on Chuck Dixon’s novel Levon’s Trade: A Vigilante Justice Thriller and directed by David Ayer from a script co-written by Sylvester Stallone. He’s either the man we wish we were or the dad we wish we had.
What that implies about how the filmmakers see their target audience is rather grim. As the title promises, Levon is a salt-of-the-earth guy – but while he leads a quiet life as a construction foreman in Chicago, his past in Britain’s Royal Marines has left its mark.
Jason Statham just wants to leave his past behind in A Working Man - sadly it catches up with him.Credit: Dan Smith/Amazon MGM Studios via AP
Reportedly he suffers from PTSD and has anger management issues, which factor into why he only sees his beloved young daughter Merry (Isla Gie) for two hours a week (her mother suffered from depression, we’re told, and died by her own hand while he was deployed overseas).
The fact he currently lives out of a pick-up truck also doesn’t help his cause with the legal system, or with Merry’s smarmy, over-educated maternal grandfather (Richard Heap), who’s now her primary carer. But Levon is excellent at threatening, torturing, maiming and killing people, and when his loved ones are under threat he’s prepared to go all out – which, in the film’s eyes, is what counts.
Jason Statham (left) and David Harbour in A Working Man.Credit: Dan Smith/Amazon MGM Studios via AP
“You are clearly a serious person,” one enemy has to acknowledge, even before seeing what it looks like when Levon goes to town. Who doesn’t crave that level of respect from the Russian mob?
When he starts slaughtering his way through the city’s underworld, it isn’t actually on behalf of a blood relative (indeed, he seems oddly blase about dragging Merry into situations where danger is close by).
Rather, he’s helping out his boss (Michael Pena) whose college-age daughter (Arianna Rivas) has been kidnapped by human traffickers. But Levon has already announced that he considers both of them extended family, in the convivial spirit of the Fast and Furious series.
Jason Statham (right) sets about rescuing his boss’s daughter, played by Arianna Rivas (left), in A Working Man.Credit: mazon MGM Studios via A
Less openly a spoof than last year’s The Beekeeper, from the same director and star, A Working Man is a mishmash of familiar elements from many ultra-violent 21st-century action films about implacable older dudes, following a pattern familiar even in Stallone’s own 1980s action-hero heyday.
Statham’s furrowed-brow under-emoting is supposed to hold it all together, along with all the dramatic backlighting (part of the climax takes place in a forest beneath an impossibly large full moon). But he’s visibly some way past his physical peak; certainly there’s no effort to persuade us that he does his own stunts.
That said, many of his foes aren’t that imposing either, especially the corrupt, effete Russians in their tuxedos or shiny tracksuits. Levon’s own respect is largely reserved for Dutch (Chidi Ajufo), the African-American leader of a local bikie gang loosely connected with the main plot.
Dutch may be a meth dealer and an all-round bad guy, but the suggestion – only as tongue-in-cheek as we want it to be – is that one real man knows how to recognise another.
A Working Man is in cinemas from March 27
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