A WORKING MAN - Mark Reviews Movies

A Working Man, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 27, 2025

It shouldn't take too much thought or effort beyond the usual to make a successful actioner. A Working Man certainly has some of the right pieces in place, mainly the presence of actor Jason Statham, who's about as reliable an action star as we have now. Give him a tough character with a righteous motive, as well as plenty of bad guys to pummel, and he'll deliver with his gravely voice and a stare that looks as if it could do as much damage as one of his punches.

Co-writer/director David Ayer does indeed give Statham exactly the correct role in Levon Cade, a former Royal Marine from England who has given up his career of violence to seek some peace and quiet in Chicago, start a family, and do anonymous work for a local family construction company. When we first meet him, things are going okay for Levon. The work is steady, and while his wife died by suicide and his father-in-law has primary custody of his daughter, Levon is working hard to prove that he is a good father and a man who has put his past behind him.

Obviously, all of that changes and fast in the Ayer and Sylvester Stallone's screenplay, an adaptation of the book Levon's Trade by Chuck Dixon. Levon proves he can fight when some random gangsters show up at a construction site to harass an employee, but he's going to have to prove he can still take the fight to some baddies when his boss' daughter is abducted by a rogue Russian mobster.

What else, really, does one want with this kind of setup? Well, some basic coherence in both the simple plotting and brutal action would be nice. It might also be of some benefit if Statham weren't just playing a caricature of the kind of role he has perfected over the course of his career or, if Ayer does have that kind of performance in mind, that the movie at hand might not take itself with such dreadful severity in the process.

Because this is essentially a story about human trafficking, the filmmakers clearly believe they must be serious, even as the material itself becomes increasingly ridiculous. Can we genuinely accept any level of sincerity on the movie's part, though, when even its hero seems to be on autopilot and one of the victims of that trafficking has a jokey one-liner alluding to rape? The subject here demands a bit more thoughtfulness (Any would suffice, especially when it comes to that "joke"), or perhaps, a generic action movie might not be the most appropriate means of addressing that topic.

Statham does his best to growl and glare at various villains, as his character promises his boss Joe (Michael Peña) to bring the man's daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) home, after the young woman is abducted at a local bar while on a night out with friends. Following a trail from the joint's bartender to the Russian mob, Levon first starts using torture, his fists and feet, and guns to get answers. While most of the action takes place in dark settings and with such rapid cuts that it's tough to make sense of where anyone is, it is satisfying on some base level. That's especially true when Levon slaps one gangster, tied to a chair and dangling on the edge of his pool, twice—the first time for hitting a woman and the second because the woman is the mobster's wife.

The rest of the plot becomes an unnecessary mess of Levon's convoluted plan to get close to the Russians by way of buying drugs from a roadhouse gang, finding human-trafficking gangster Dimi (Maximillian Osinski), and, for some reason, doubling back on his plan with the saloon gang, apparently so that there can be a chase after a lot of action-free dialogue and exposition. There are a lot of scenes here that seem to exist either to stretch out the plot or to justify some unthinking action sequence. The big climax, an all-out assault on a dingy clubhouse in the middle of nowhere, has so many bad guys showing up to keep the punches and bullets flying that the sequence collapses upon itself into a comedic anticlimax.

If any of it made sense or had a sense of humor about itself or was competently assembled in terms of the action, A Working Man might have gotten away with some cheap thrills. Instead, the whole affair just looks cheap and, when it comes to the subject matter at its core, feels cheaply exploitative.

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