A Working Man Review: A Mindless Actioner

While A Working Man boasts impeccably crafted action sequences and a great performance from Jason Statham, it isn’t enough to salvage a fairly unpleasant screenplay.

None of the movies that the producing duo Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who were behind Bronson and Thompson’s films, released in the 80s had particularly refined screenplays: the caricatured and egregiously stereotyped villains (notably, American actor Robert Forster playing an Arab in Golan’s The Delta Force) were usually a simple excuse to have Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, or Michael Dudikoff act as a one-man army, and where killing them in hilariously over-the-top ways would serve as a symbol of flag-waving patriotism. And yet, they are incredibly fun and still remain, to this day, some of the most significant pieces of 80s genre cinema you can watch and have the time of your life. 

The Beekeeper was very much in line with these types of movies: it contained a muddy political text and undercooked antagonists, with Statham playing an average, honest man with a past he’d have liked to have left behind until a person close to his life became the victim of a heinous crime, leading him to come out of the shadows an exact his “particular set of skills.” And it works, because it falls exactly in the purview of the great Cannon films of the past, never taking itself too seriously while promising grandiose carnage at every turn. You wouldn’t be surprised to know that A Working Man contains the exact same throughline as The Beekeeper, though with a more conservative political angle that sadly feels distasteful and shamelessly exploitative of its central subject. 

Based on Chuck Dixon’s novel “Levon’s Trade”, A Working Man discusses the very real and harrowing subject of human trafficking, which has recently been trivialized in Sound of Freedom, a movie that gave ammunition to QAnon conspiracy theorists rather than depicting the problem in a thoughtful and authentic light. In real life, most victims of human trafficking do not get kidnapped, but rather fall prey to someone they know closely and with whom they have established a sense of trust. No “one-man army” could ever dismantle an entire trafficking ring on their own: operations are usually more complex and intricate than those that are usually outlined in cinema. 

While it’s not uncommon for creative liberties to be taken when transposing any true story on film, the mainstream viewpoint of human trafficking (or any subject of the sort) is usually shaped by the movies people watch, which does not give an accurate depiction of the subject, nor does it talk about the actual human cost of such a crime, leading many susceptible people to easily fall for bonked-out theories like QAnon or Pizzagate.

In many respects, A Working Man does feel like this year’s Sound of Freedom: Ayer’s movie continues to perpetuate the myth that total strangers kidnap human trafficking victims and sets up a fantasy in which one man will successfully dismantle an entire criminal operation through his skillset. Though to be fair, one is a fiction film, while Sound of Freedom was based on actual events. Ayer and co-writer Sylvester Stallone have some leeway in making us suspend our disbelief in only using this backdrop as an excuse to allow Jason Statham to kick mega-ass.

But the film still plays with popular generalizations on human trafficking that feel more in line with right-wing fantasies than legitimate facts for us to latch onto Levon Cade’s (Statham) story of rescuing Jenny Garcia (Arianna Rivas) from a group of stereotypically Russian mobsters, which makes it hard for us to care about what’s intrinsically going on in the picture. 

You certainly don’t go into A Working Man thinking that it will be a thought-provoking drama that sheds light on the issue. However, the overall viewing experience still leaves a bad taste in the mouth when the movie tries extremely hard to have a dramatic core through Jenny’s relationship with her father, Joe (Michael Peña), by continuously cutting to her, locked-up and praying to God, while Joe does the same thing at home in her room. This sets up the inextricable fact that tangible human stakes are at play, and that Levon must race against time to rescue her before something bad happens. It becomes especially harder to suspend our disbelief when the setting Ayer depicts isn’t as heightened as the cartoonish world of The Beekeeper but rooted in the reality we live in. 

Levon was once a military soldier but now works in construction. He’s a blue-collar American citizen, he’s not looking for trouble, and he’s doing what he must to make ends meet and visit his daughter (Isla Gie), who lives with her grandfather, having taken full custody of the child after Levon’s wife committed suicide, (that’s the only thing we’ll know about her). It’s only when Joe urgently tells Levon that Jenny got abducted that his services are required. Levon returns to his past life after a heartfelt conversation with one of his war friends, Gunny (David Harbour), who warns him that this life may not want him back, but the working man might not have much of a choice if he ever wants a chance to find Joe’s daughter.

From there, Levon works his way into the operation by tracking down the leader, Dimi (Maximilian Osinski), going from one stereotypical antagonist to the next until he meets the man himself and puts his plan in motion. It’s all very much steeped in a form of gritty realism that seems far removed from what Ayer played with in his last action movie. The action sequences are less over-the-top than they were in The Beekeeper, the political subtext is more in line with the current real-life administration than a fictitious one, and the “working man” is a bigger “average joe” than the last character Statham played on screen. 

That’s why it feels particularly distasteful to have a human trafficking story based on fantasies rather than fact. No matter how great the action scenes may be, we still can’t wash away the unpleasant feeling the film leaves us with. I was able to suspend my disbelief when Chuck Norris, dual-wielding Uzis, single-handedly took down a global terrorist organization who were planning to enact World War III with thinly-developed motivations in Invasion U.S.A. I couldn’t even explain to you how their plan worked; I was just enjoying the endless carnage on screen. That’s all that mattered for a movie like that, and that’s all that should theoretically matter for A Working Man. Yet, the film constantly pulls away from the action through its haphazardly-written drama in an attempt to give some heft to Jenny’s arc, but it severely lacks the nuance and texture that would make her plight feel far less objectionable than how Ayer and Stallone depict it on screen. 

Yes, the action is pretty spectacular. Ayer is a very gifted artist and fully demonstrates his skills when he’s tasked with constructing a claustrophobic fight inside a moving truck, which recalls The Beekeeper’s Lazarus fight. Intentional quick cuts exacerbate the sense of tension Levon feels, and the impact of each hit (and knife stab) is incredibly cathartic. The climax is also a major highlight: it’s a relentless cacophony of extreme gun violence, one-on-one knife fights, and grenade throws as all hell breaks loose. There are some over-the-top kills, especially in the back half of the picture, that make us seemingly forget about the issues that stick out like a sore thumb, especially when Statham himself is as entertaining as he was in The Beekeeper. 

It also helps that Statham has a note-perfect sense of comedic timing as he interrogates and even manipulates the bad guys, irrespective of the accents non-Russian actors give to their performances. That alone does give the movie its own sense of momentum, and we slowly begin to become invested in a relatively simply written story, if only to see Jason Statham accomplish the improbable. But Stallone’s screenplay is chock-full of horrendously written dialogues that it almost feels like a bad parody of Cannon films more than the actual productions that Golan and Globus released, which were filled with not one, but many iconic one-liners that made each production a unique product of the ‘80s, alongside its bevy of explosions and shameless U.S. propaganda that anyone could eat up. 

A Working Man certainly has the ultimate one-liner (“You ain’t a cop, you’re A Working Man”) and a chunk of great action, but any attempt at being a serious drama to depict the real-life tragedy of human trafficking fails on every front, preferring to continue trivializing the central subject matter than treating it with some form of respect. And it didn’t even need to be too deep; some level of humanity to make us care about the sadly dehumanized characters would have sufficed. People only care about Statham exacting his brand of action on easy-to-beat villains plucked straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. However, when the movie’s aesthetic is far more realistic than the actor’s previous collaboration with Ayer, perhaps touching on such a horrific crime, with little to no care in presenting it authentically may not have been the best idea. 

This is especially apparent when you want to mirror your “one-man army” fantasies inside a self-serious world that not even a studio like The Cannon Group would’ve depicted this way. There’s some fun to be had, but this is not a Charles Bronson-esque film. Truth be told, Statham is far too talented for this kind of shoddy material and for him to be typecast as the next Bronson. Has anyone forgotten how great he was in Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man? I’d like more of that, please, and less of A Working Man.

A Working Man will be released globally in theaters on March 28, 2025.