A Working Man: Movie Review

Cast: Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Michael Pena, Maximillian Osinski, David Harbour, Arianna Rivas
Director: David Ayer

If Jason Statham was hoping to reclaim some of the energy and excitement he garnered with The Beekeeper in his latest outing, he's sorely mistaken.

While A Working Man, with its Sylvester Stallone-helmed plot and production, has elements that work well colliding the everyday with the muscle-crunching fights, most of what transpires is just unterminably dull and dour.

Statham is divorced dad Levon Cade, a former Marine Commando living in Chicago and now working a construction site for a family-led business. A wayward soul, who's given food by plenty of members of the workforce, Cade's the reliable force who sticks up for his immigrant colleagues when the bad guys show but rarely allows himself to be part of a family.

However, when the construction boss's daughter is kidnapped after a night out celebrating school, he's spurred into action at the behest of the family, setting him on a path with a group of child sex traffickers, Russian mobsters and his own troubled past - all while trying to negotiate life as a single dad.

A Working Man is just endlessly and needlessly slow, promising to build to a climax that promises much as the angered sides converge on a single location. But despite maybe 10 minutes of well-orchestrated mayhem, the result is anything but enticing, a damp squib of an ending that hints at Cade colliding with an angered Russian again.

Statham does what he does in the genre - and what he has been doing for years - but the dour touches of the script do little to lighten the mood and even give a hint of warmth to the character. Maybe Cade is damaged by his time in the marines, but the script cares so little for depth that it barely even registers after an initial mention and his father-in-law ranting about how damaged he is.

Ayer's penchant for dyeing everything in a perma-yellow and quick cutting during the action sequences soon grows tired too, leaving you longing for either some well-choreographed fight scenes rather than brutally cut encounters that deny you the thrill of the chase.

It helps little there's no fun nor charisma on show here - and if anything it may be called A Working Man, but you can't help but shake the feeling that it's the audiences that have to work for anything in this film - and that's nothing short of a travesty.