By Trudi-Rose Edwards
A Working Man, a new movie starring Jason Statham – is pretty much what you’d expect from a new movie starring Jason Statham. Action, violence, explosions, the movie ticks all the boxes…so why does it feel…off?
The premise is simple (and nothing hugely original) Statham plays Levon Cade, a former Royal Marine who’s now working on a construction site in Chicago whilst fighting a custody battle with his ex-wife’s father. When his employer’s daughter is kidnapped by members of the sex-trafficking wing of a Russian mob, Levon decides to hunt them down and bring her home. There’s literally zero complexity to this plot which plays out more like the script of a video game with progressively tougher (but equally bland) bad guys introduced for Levon to take down before he moves on to the next set-piece.
Look, the action is great – it’s Jason Statham, of course the action is good – and the sound guys must have had a whale of a time coming up with so many different bone breaks. Statham himself is great, barely breaking a sweat and bringing a little more heart than you might expect from a mindless action film (it really is mindless, more on that in a bit) through his scenes with his young daughter. He’s as charismatic as a moody, ex-marine, mysterious-past, tough guy can be.
But sadly, the rest of the film lacks the same charisma.
The script is diabolical. I called the plot simple but really it’s beyond simple, it’s more like a first-draft outline of a plot peppered with a few ‘one-liners’ and barely expositional dialogue (I’ve always assumed one-liners are meant to be witty, or at least moderately funny but The Working Man’s one-liners are literally just single lines of dialogue like, “good luck” in response to “I’m going to kill you”). There’s no substance – none, literally none – no twists, no tension, no cliffhangers, no tension, no compelling dialogue, no peril, no misdirects, no character development – nothing. The plot is literally: Levon arrives at scene, bad guys appear, a snarling exchange of badly written dialogue, ACTION! EXPLOSION! BLOOD! GUNS!, Levon defeats bad guys (not a spoiler), gets his next nugget of info, leaves – repeat.
If aliens invade Earth in search of a crash course in the basics of action-led storytelling, show them A Working Man because its colour-by-numbers, entry-level approach does the job (although be prepared for some major alien side-eye). The only left-field moment is when Levon decides to pour an entire bottle of syrup over a bad guy’s pancake stack in what I think was meant to be a cool/edgy/funny moment – that was bizarre.
It was after someone (goodness knows who, Levon and his daughter aside, every other character blended into one) proclaimed “you’re not a cop, you’re a working man!” that I began to wonder whether I’d misread the movie – I’d gone in thinking it was a straight action movie but surely, surely this had to be a parody? Some kind of Jason Statham, action thriller parody that I just hadn’t understood. With that in mind, A Working Man improves dramatically and becomes, dare I say, enjoyable. It’s a parody, a comedy, Jason Statham is playing Jason Statham, I get it now.
Only…
…by the final third I began to realise that there weren’t enough jokes for it to be a parody. It’s not tongue in cheek enough; the score is too serious, the camera work is too serious, the barebones script is too serious.
Is it a joke or not? Who knows – certainly not me – but whether you’re supposed to be laughing with or at it, A Working Man is certainly entertaining.
A Working Man is in cinemas from March 28
Photos by Dan Smith