Jason Statham: Monster Hunter.  That’s what stuck in my mind as I watched Statham do his punch-kick-shoot-stab thing in A Working Man, an entertaining movie that often feels generic and routine.  Although there are no literal monsters in this movie, the movie’s gothic touches and freakish villains imply what could have been, if the filmmakers had the nerve to take the story in the direction they apparently wanted to go.  Seeing Statham hunting and killing evil Russians is fine, but swap out those ordinary targets to vampires and werewolves and we’d be talking next-level badassery.

Before we get to the villains, A Working Man establishes that Levon Cade (Statham) lives his life according to what I call the “tough guy code”.  He is a construction site supervisor, and we all know that genuine tough guy’s work with their hands and come home dirty.  No click-clacking away on a keyboard for this guy.  Tough guys also treat their subordinates with respect.  Levon tells his team to work hard but safely.  “Let’s all go home with as many fingers that we came with.”  Simple, yet sage advice.  In return for his respectful treatment, the other construction workers routinely give him home cooking in Tupperware.  You know you’re loved when people give you tribute.

Levon appears to be the only white guy on the team, which is mostly comprised of Latinos.  (Tough guys aren’t racist bastards.)  The family running the project are also Latino, including Levon’s boss Joe Garcia (a criminally underutilized Michael Peña).  (Is the movie going out of its way to be inclusive?  Sure, and why not?)  Levon gets along well with Joe, his wife Carla (Noemi Gonzalez) and their daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas), who considers him an uncle.  There’s plenty of mutual respect between everyone, which as I mentioned before is in accordance with the tough guy code.

Although Levon’s work life is fine, he has experienced hardship.  A former Royal Marine, his wife committed suicide while he was deployed.  (The movie never offers an explanation why.)  His father-in-law, Jordan, sees Levon as a man who attracts violence and has hired high-priced ($1,000 an hour!) lawyers to fight Levon’s parental rights to his own daughter, Merry (Isla Gie).  Levon loves his daughter, though and is doing everything he can to afford reasonably-priced lawyers to fight on his behalf, including sleeping in his truck.  (The Tough Guy Code demands that men only drive trucks, by the way.)

Jenny just completed her first semester of business school and wants to go out with her friends to celebrate.  Naturally, Joe is incredulous about her wanting to celebrate the end of their first three months of college, but he hands over his credit card anyway.  (Dads, never do this.)  When the girls arrive at the first bar, they’re observed by human trafficker Viper (Emmett J. Scanlan) and Artemis (Eve Mauro).  Viper follows the girls around, covertly snapping pictures for a client who will pay big money for one of them.  When Jenny is finally alone and out of view, Viper kidnaps her.  

The following Monday, Levon returns to work to find Joe and Carla distraught.  Jenny hasn’t come home and they can’t reach her.  They know Levon’s background and offer him a bag of money to bring their daughter home.  Levon declines at first, stating “I’m not that guy anymore.”  But he changes his mind in the span of a minute, turning into a one man reconnaissance team.  He really has no choice, because he did tell Jenny the other day that he had her back.  (It wasn’t a pinkie swear, but it still counts in the tough guy code.)

While all of the bad guys Levon encounters are all thoroughly despicable, Levon has zero remorse over what he does to them while tracking Jenny down.  The first guy on the food chain is the bartender/dealer at the place where Jenny went missing.  First Levon waterboards him while interrogating him, then he uses him as a human shield when two soon-to-be-dead Russian toughs arrive and start shooting.

Levon tracks down Russian mob boss Wolo Kolisnyk (Jason Flemyng), who Levon observes beating his trophy wife.  (These really aren’t nice people.)  Levon threatens to drown Wolo, but Wolo would rather respond angrily with the old “do you know who I am?” routine.  Levon doesn’t like Wolo’s attitude and lets him drown in his own indoor swimming pool.

Meanwhile, Viper and his equally crazy sister Artemis (Eve Mauro) deliver Jenny to her buyer, but she remembers the survival training from her grandfather (!) and bites his face.  This puts brother and sister on the outs with their boss Dimi (Maximilian Osinski) who says they can have their way with Jenny.  She manages to escape but is returned by corrupt cops.  (If you haven’t realized yet, there are very few good guys in this movie.)

The further Levon descends into the criminal underworld in search of Jenny, the worse the villains become.  After gaining the trust of a drug-dealing motorcycle gang fronted by two ex-military men, Levon fights his way past two Russian brothers dressed in colorful club wear.  This incurs the wrath of their reptilian father Symon, a member of a Russian organized crime group called “The Brotherhood”.  If you have any doubts as to how evil Symon is, he carries around a cane topped with a skull and gleaming red eyes.  The henchmen Symon dispatches to kill Levon look like they watched the Blade movies too many times.  And just in case you doubted the gothic influences on display, the final confrontation takes place in a decrepit mansion out in the woods, illuminated by a full moon.  (Unfortunately, no werewolves factor into this story, although they really should have.)

Recommendation

Having only recently become a fan of Jason Statham, I have no basis to tell whether A Working Man is better or worse than any of his previous “one man wrecking crew” films.  This one has a very grim tone, which certainly is appropriate for a story about human trafficking.  Even still, the dialog is surprisingly free of ironic quips from either Statham or the bad guys.  Everything is played completely straight by everyone involved, much to the movie’s detriment.  (There are a couple of funny reaction lines thrown in.)

As expected for this kind of film, Statham racks up an impressive body count over the course of the movie.  A website tells me that he is personally responsible for thirty-three deaths, and that sounds about right, although it felt like more.  Also as expected, he kills people in a variety of ways, some bloodier than others.  Even though he’s now fifty-seven, Statham shows no signs of slowing down, and he looks good in all of the fighting choreography.  

What’s unfortunate is that unlike The Beekeeper, this movie doesn’t give Statham a single juicy line in the entire film.  (The funniest joke he makes is about a Bluetooth camera.)  Aside from Statham, the two young actresses playing daughters have the best lines in the film.  When David Harbor shows up in a cameo to chew the scenery a bit, I wished he could have played sidekick throughout the film.

This is director David Ayer’s second outing with Statham, and he seems to enjoy making these violent B-movie revenge fantasies.  He does an excellent job accentuating the grimy aspects of the story, particularly the underworld locations.  Ayer definitely has a gift for filming action sequences, which is put to good use here.

A Working Man is a satisfactory throwback to the “one man as unstoppable army” films from the Eighties.  Although it’s well made and Jason Statham is reliably tough, the overwhelming seriousness of the story prevents it from being more than a standard search-and-kill-everyone mission.  Credit to director David Ayer for jazzing things up with an assortment of outlandish villains and phantasmagoric sets.  Mildly recommended.

Analysis

The Tough Guy Code:  Clip-n-save!

• Works in construction
• Drives a truck
• Treats everyone with respect (until they give him a reason not to)
• Abhors racism
• Loves his daughter and will protect her with his life
• Keeps his word
• Drinks beer
• Eats eggs and bacon for breakfast
• Honors his fellow veterans (until…you get the idea)

Horrors

Looking over Jason Statham’s movie career, he’s only acted in one film with supernatural elements, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001)  I haven’t seen that film, so I can’t speak to its quality, but it’s very poorly rated on Rotten Tomatoes (23%/25%) and IMDB (4.9).  I wonder if that experience soured Statham on starring in horror films.  Regardless, Statham looks good squaring off against the vampire-inspired villains in A Working Man, which includes a mob boss who looks like Grandpa Munster and his Twilight reject henchmen.   I don’t see a reason why Statham’s routine wouldn’t work in a movie where he kicks some actual vampire ass, like Wesley Snipes in Blade.  He would also be a perfect fit in a modern take on Van Helsing, where he could take on all the classic monsters.  Who wouldn’t want to see Statham battle Frankenstein’s Monster?

Sly’s influence

The screenplay was written by Sylvester Stallone, which explains A Working Man’s overwhelmingly serious tone.  If you close your eyes, you can imagine a younger Stallone in Statham’s place, speaking the same terse dialog while showing little emotion.  While the underlying subject matter of the movie is serious, there’s no reason why the movie needed to be so dry.  Statham kills so many people with brutal efficiency here, he should be allowed to enjoy his handiwork at least once, instead of in complete solemnity.

Inclusivity

Not only is Statham the only white guy on the construction site, but he works for a Latino family financing the project.  The only reason why I noticed the racial makeup of the construction site was because movies routinely depict white people as being in charge of important and expensive work.  In this regard, A Working Man is an excellent example of how representation matters in entertainment.  The fact that this relatively minor aspect of the movie stood out proves how powerful the images presented by filmed entertainment are.  It really shouldn’t matter that Statham’s character reports a Latino boss, but it does because images leave a lasting impression, and the more we see them depict the same thing, the more we believe they reflect reality.