REVIEW: Mid-Budget B-Action Is Back With ‘A Working Man’

Action is at its best when it throws caution to the wind and leans all the way into a premise that on the surface seems like it won’t work. Jason Statham‘s career is full of these movies, and while they may not all be critically acclaimed, the mid-budget B-action movie has a special place in action lovers’ hearts. Writer-director David Ayer (with Sylvester Stallone also contributing to the script) gets that, at least when he’s working with Statham. Last year, the duo released The Beekeeper, and this year, it’s A Working Man. 

Both films cast Statham as a wandering man with a past that taught him to kill his way through anything. It’s a tried and true trope and one that he embodies well, but Ayer has been able to use absurdity throughout both films to keep the audience entertained and let his action lead do the most with whatever her has around him. Based on the novel “Levon’s Trade” by Chuck Dixon, A Working Man, Staham plays a construction foreman, Levon Cade, who has been virtually adopted by the Garcia family, who runs his company.

His employees and the Garcias love Levon. They feed him homemade food, joke, and lean on him. But when Jenny (Arianna Rivas), the Garcia’s only daughter, goes out to celebrate her first semester completed in college, the family is at a loss. Family patriarch Joe (Michael Peña) takes a moment to tell Levon that he knows that he can find Jenny. While Levon hasn’t shared the depth of his past with Joe, the Garcias are a military family, and according to Joe, he can just tell. Then, A Working Man is off to the races as Levon tries to find Jenny’s last movements and ultimately begins to stalk the people surrounding her abduction.

Jason Statham & David Ayer continue to show why mid-budget action can be great.

The Working Man does two things for me that help make it an absolutely enjoyable ride. Levon is a girl dad extraordinaire in how he treats his daughter and his dedication to Jenny both before and after she’s kidnapped. And to be honest, the joke that every Mexican family has a white boy they adopt is alive and well when it comes to Levon.

He’s fighting for the Garcias as much as he does his own kid, but more interestinglu, the way that Aqyer shows the Garcia’s welcoming Levon and giving him their love through food, hugs, and of course jokes, is genuinely one of the most perfect exemplification of what its like when a Mexican family just decides you’re a part of them. Ask my husband. It’s a heartfelt core that resonates and makes the absolute carnage we see throughout the film grounded in its absurdity.

But no one walked into A Working Man to see how this gruff single father and ex-special forces guy who carries the guilt for his wife’s death builds his found family. Audiences walk in for bone-crunching, loud, and creative fight sequences. And they get that here, with the film doubling down on violence we saw in David Ayer’s last action movie, and upping the stakes with louder bombs and even badder baddies.

The action set pieces are large, but the mid-budget flare is still there in tight locations that range from a honky tonk biker bar to a trap house and even an extravagant night club and the back of a van. Levon is unknown throughout the majority of the fight sequences.

He’s just a devil ripping through Russian gangsters and drug dealers. Every firefight and one-on-one kill where he tries to extract information is followed by Merab Ninidze‘s Yuri discussing the scene and the carnage and trying to mount his arm of the Russian mob to get revenge for the family members he keeps losing. But to them, this devil couldn’t possibly be doing all of this for just one girl.

As the Russian mob mounts its counterattack on Levon, he gets closer to finding Jenny, and every fight just gets bigger. And, the duo who kidnapped Jenny, Viper (Emmett J Scanlan) and Artemis (Eve Mauro) keep fumbling through trying to keep their tenacious captive docile. It’s this point where A Working Man stands out from the other times that an action lead has tried to find a kidnapped surrogate or actual daughter before she’s sold off to some creepy sadist of a buyer.

A Working Man differentiates itself from the Taken-likes by ensuring Jenny has agency even when captive.

Jenny, unlike the other damsels, has been taking karate for years. Her grandfather was a Green Beret, and he taught her a lot, and she doesn’t take any of the abuses lying down. This is a key part to what makes A Working Man so damn endearing as an actioner. Jenny gets to hit back at the people who captured her, and that’s a rarity that shines here. It also bonds her and Levon, who clearly has reached tio or at least primo status with her and the Garcias.

A Working Man is a bombastic movie with characters that are clearly there to be the loudest version of their action movie trope. Still, it works so well by leaning in and not trying to be anything other than what it is. Whether its David Harbour as Gunny, the old war buddy who is blind but still has an arsenal in his remote cabinet, or Chidi Ajufo‘s Dutch, who runs drugs for a Russian heir but has to stand up to shake someone’s hand. Even the quintessential family black sheep, Dimi Kolisnyk (Maximilian Osinski), who got everyone into this mess, they all work.

Do you laugh at them? Yes. However, the aesthetics that David Ayer plays with in production and costume design clearly exist to ensure that you do.

While the single father storyline is a little too much piling on of struggle, it does add some narrative intention to how and why Levon chooses what he does. That said, the moments with his daughter disrupt pacing for both the slower investigation moments and the larger action sequences.

A Working Man understands the assignment, and it’s better for it. For too long, Jason Statham’s action charisma was relegated to direct-to-DVD or streaming forays as studies invested less in the mid-budget romp. But now? The B-action movie is back in theaters, and that’s something to celebrate.