'A Working Man' Review: David Ayer Needs To Be Stopped

Look, there’s no anti-Statham prejudice here. This is a Statham positive zone. I love The Stath as much as anyone else. Jason Statham. The Stath. The Stathinator. The Stathue Of Liberty. Stathislaw Lem. I should stop there before I go on. Otherwise, who knows how long I might go on for? Maybe even 116 minutes. Which would be an awful experience for everyone involved, but would still a better time than The Stath’s new film, A Working Man, which is a film with an astoundingly generic title and an even worse contents that goes on for exactly that long.

This is a stupid film. And not even a fun stupid film, in the great tradition of well-crafted boneheaded roller coasters like, say, Shoot ‘Em Up or The Rock. Far from it. A Working Man is astonishingly boring in its stupidity, and blandly po-faced in its crappy, sub-Taken take on the tired trope of innocent girls kidnapped by bad men needing rescuing by men who may have once been bad but who are now trying to do good. And, look, I get it: It’s easy to forget because it came out seventeen (what?!?) years ago, but Taken was a monstrous hit. Many, many movies tried to imitate it. Hell, the next decade plus of Liam Neeson’s career arc was altered by it. So it’s understandable that A Working Man wants to be Taken. But it really, really wants to be Taken, and it reeks of it. It’s sitting slumped on a stool in a dingy bar somewhere moaning that Taken has slept with its wife and stolen the promotion that was coming to it this time, for sure this time it was.

A Working Man, directed by David ‘grit, grit, more pointless grit!’ Ayer, and co-written by Ayer with Sylvester Stallone, is based on the 2014 novel ‘Levon’s Trade’ by Chuck Dixon. Jason Statham is the titular Levon Cade, an ex-special forces soldier (of course) who now works construction. I have no idea of the quality of the source material, but if it’s any good, the author has the right to be, at the very least, somewhat miffed with Ayer.

The film version of his story is now forever codified as an insultingly insipid and generic action movie devoid of any fun or thrills, stitched together with wonky shaky cam and editing straight out of 2010, wasting the charisma, martial arts chops, and humor of its leading man.

Fair play to Jason Statham, however, as it’s almost as if he sensed what kind of directionless slop he was starring in even as it was being made, and he endeavored to give us at least one thing that would be memorable about the film: His accent. This isn’t the usual Statham mockney twang that I assumed was a contractual requirement. This is a shapeshifting chimera straight out of Christian Bale’s lost-over-the-Atlantic vortex. Trying to pin it down is an exercise in near-hypnosis, and is the only reason I managed to sit all the way through this nonsense and its lazy stereotypes and Cybertruck cameos.