Statham Kills Again

I generally like Jason Statham’s movies. Heck, I just reviewed another of his starring pics, Wrath of Man, recently, and I generally had praise for it, and for the actor. Statham doesn’t exactly have range, but when you give him a role suited for his style, giving a character who’s a gruff, brawler of a dude, then Statham does just fine. It does tend to make all of his films feel pretty similar, but you know that going into his films. Like, really, is there much difference in character between The Transporter, The Beekeeper, and Wrath of Man? Not at all.

As such I knew pretty well what to expect when going into A Working Man, Statham’s latest film. The movie was written by Sylvester Stallone and David Ayer and directed by Ayer, and it’s about as gruff, flat, and basic as you’d expect from that duo. Stallone is long past his writing prime, far removed from the working actor just trying to get a good role for himself, writing scripts he cared about like Rocky and First Blood. This film feels far more in line with the kind of blunt action films Stallone has contributed to more recently, like Rambo and The Expendables. That doesn’t mean anything he contributes to has to be bad, just that it’s going to lack a lot of nuance.

A Working Man lacks nuance… but yeah, it’s also bad. It’s Stallone and Ayer making a Taken ripoff, one that feels like it could have had John Rambo in the lead role until, at some point in development, they realized it didn’t work for that purpose. Technically it’s an adaptation of a Chuck Dixon novel, Levon’s Trade, and I’d like to think the novel (which I haven’t read) has more depth and nuance to it than this film because, wow, this is just such an empty, hollow film. That it works at all is a testament to the actors attached because, without them, this would have been completely unwatchable dreck. Instead, I managed to get through the film but I have to hope, very dearly, no one ever decides to make a sequel.

Statham stars as Levon Cade, a former Royal Marines Colour Sergeant who retired after his wife’s suicide so he could be near his kid. His daughter, Merry, lives with her grandfather, Jordan Roth (Richard Heap), who only lets Levon see his daughter once a month because, as per Jordan, Levon is a dangerous man to be around. And that is true, as Levon has a particular set of skills that he could use to cause serious trouble. Except he’s retired, working for a construction company run by Joe (Michael Peña) and Carla (Noemi Gonzalez) Garcia, keeping his head down.

Trouble comes, though, when Joe’s daughter, Jenny (Arianna Rivas), is kidnapped one night while she’s out partying with friends. Despite being the designated driver, and being quite responsible, she’s the one snatched, chloroformed and dragged off from a club by to low-level gangsters, Viper (Emmett J. Scanlan) and Artemis (Eve Mauro). The two run their own trade, kidnapping girls and selling them off to rich men, and they have a client that likes the way Jenny looks (seeing them in photos sent from Viper’s phone). With Jenny gone, Joe and Carla turn to the only person they trust to get her back, Levon, and he’ll stop at nothing to help them out.

The initial act of A Working Man seems to set up a more interesting movie than what we eventually get. We see Levon struggling to try and find balance in his life. He’s a well trained soldier who has an inclination to use his fists (and his skills) to solve problems but, at the same time, he desperately wants to keep his nose clean. He has a daughter to think about and is in a legal battle with his father-in-law for custody. The film wants us to think he’ll have to fight to stay on the straight and narrow while, somehow, working to save Jenny as best as he can. That would be a dramatic arc that would keep the audience invested.

But now, all that falls away pretty quickly. Joe and Carla approach Levon for help finding their daughter. He initially declines but in the very next scene, for seemingly no reason, he suddenly says, “yeah, I’m gonna help.” It’s a decision that would make sense if the film invested more in its characters, but by this point we’ve only gotten one scene with Joe and Carla along with their daughter, and a second, briefer, scene with Jenny talking to Levon, so we don’t really understand any of their connections, why Levon would care about them, or what would tempt him to put everything on the line for this girl. Yes, no one wants to see a girl get trafficked, but you want some character development to make Levon’s decisions stick.

The film eventually handwaves at this, giving Joe some dialogue about how they were there for Levon and they had his back, and Levon calls them “family”. But it’s all perfunctory. We don’t see this kind of lived in relationship actually reflected in the interactions of the characters. Levon is just a dude, leading a construction project for Joe and Carla. As far as what we actually see on film, they could be anyone to Levon. This could be his first job for them or his thirtieth. That’s how little work is put into developing all of these relationships.

Once Levon decides to fight for Jenny, he completely changes. He goes from a man walking a tight wire act to suddenly a lethal enforcer who will kill anyone and everyone that gets in his way. He leaves a trail of bodies from one side of the county to the other, including a couple of dirty cops. Sure, everyone in the movie (arguably) deserves it, but when you consider that the film went out of its way to specifically state that Levon has to keep his nose clean so he can win back his kid, maybe he shouldn’t be leaving so much evidence around that someone, eventually, will find.

Amusingly there’s a cleaning crew that shows up at certain crime scenes, brought there by the Russian Mob (oh, right, this whole plot somehow dovetails into the Russian Mafia, although it’s really as consequential to the story as every other plot point in the long run), which seems to be the movie’s way of saying, “no harm, Levon. We’ll clean this up for you.” Having real consequences for Levon would go a long way towards propelling the drama, as would having his daughter, Merry, be anything more than a prop for the film to trot out so it can feint at Levon being a real character.

He’s not. He’s a collection of military tropes, laid over Liam Neeson’s character from Taken, Brian Mills, and then given a British twist so Statham can play him. He’s not a real character, he’s a Statham gruff performance without any depth or development. Characters show up, say lines, and then disappear. Plot points are raised and then never go anywhere. Stuff happens, people die, and you hardly care about any of it at all. There are the bones of a possible interesting movie somewhere in here, but the script murders that in the first act, and then murders so much else as Levon cuts his way through the threadbare story.

About the only thing I will say for the film is that the action is watchable. Not great, as nothing in this film is actually good at all, but it is competent. You can see what’s going on, there’s decent flow to the action, and it isn’t all obscured with weird angles or a lot of editing. Statham is a competent action star and it shows. The film doesn’t have to compromise to try and make his action look good, leading to sequences that work okay. I don’t care if Levon lives or dies, of course, because I’m not invested in him at all, but at least I can see what he’s doing as he murders half a state’s worth of bad guys.

A Working Man is a bad film. It has fine people working on it, a story that could be good in the right hands, and enough money thrown at it ($40 Mil) that it would be hard to make something truly unwatchable out of it (although considering Babylon A.D. was made for nearly twice this budget and it is unwatchable, I guess that’s a feat in itself). But there’s no saving this film. It would have needed to be rebuilt, from the ground up, at the scripting stage to make anything good out of this movie. It’s a simple kidnapped girl revenge tale told as bluntly as possible. The only good way to watch it is to not bother at all.