‘I’ ON CULTURE
The new Jason Statham film, A Working Man, is perhaps not surprisingly similar to his very popular The Beekeeper, made last year. That movie did very well at the box office, which led to this one, not a sequel, but one that also focuses on the old-fashioned notion that justice should win out and strong men can take care of finding that justice in a corrupt system.
Levon Cade (Statham) is a former heroic Royal Marines commando who now works as leader of a construction team in the US. He has become almost a member of the Garcia family that owns the company, a valued leader and trusted comrade. When their teenage daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped by Russian sex traffickers, her father Joe (Michael Peña) completely collapses, and Levon takes matters into his own hands. He has been told by the father of his late wife that he is a violent man, as a reason to keep him from his daughter, and we certainly get to see that.
The people who took Jenny are the Bratva, the Russian Mafia, led by Symon Kharchenko (Andrej Kaminsky), whose brother Wolo (Jason Flemyng) takes the lead on all of this and is quickly killed by Levon, leading to the Russians becoming aware of him. He infiltrates the organization by pretending to be a dealer to get close to Dimi (Maximilian Osinsky), Wolo’s son, who handles the sex trafficking for the group. At the same time, Jenny is sold to a very weird client, but instead of going along with it, she bites the man’s cheek off and is ordered to be killed, but the client changes his mind and wants to try to tame her again. Then Levon kills more Russians. And then even more, since he has killed Symon’s sons. Things then really get violent.
The script by director David Ayer and Sylvester Stallone (really!) is not as interesting as the one for The Beekeeper. There, at least, there was a new type of villain, one who used the computer to fleece old people, and the bad guy, despite being a creep, let others handle the nasty work. Here, we simply have thugs. And that creates a major weakness. Few of the Russians seem to be smart. Most seem to be caricatures, and that weakens the story. Right from the start, there are logical holes. Why would a professional criminal organization go after regular citizens who might have powerful families or friends, when there are thousands of runaways and smuggled migrant kids available, who would have no one to miss them or report them? The chain of command is remarkably weak. As a result, there is no killing that really makes much of a difference.
But there are many, many deaths, and just about all are bad guys, another weakness. In The Beekeeper, the bad guys built up a decent body count. Here, they probably fired thousands of bullets that never hurt any good guy — shades of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. The bad ones had only their weirdness.
Statham, of course, is the center of everything. And he is a master of the fight scene. There were at least a half dozen major ones, including one really fabulous battle inside a moving van. Of course, no real person could take the punishment that was inflicted on him, but nothing was going to deter him. The film at a few points did manage to get him in a somewhat different mode, joking with the Garcia clan, dealing with a comrade blinded while in the service, and particularly when dealing with his young daughter (Isla Gie).
The rest of the cast was mostly wasted. David Harbour was almost unrecognizable as Gunny, the blind veteran. Peña was only in a couple of scenes. Kaminsky looked appropriately weird, but just about all the Russians were one-dimensional. I liked Rivas a lot. Her Jenny was not a damsel in distress. She fought all the way through, right to the end. In a testosterone-filled movie, it was nice to feature a woman who could be both sweet and tough.
This is a good B movie. There are few pretensions. No major dramatic moments, no real insight into the nature of humans. But it’s filled with good action scenes handled by one of the best action actors in the business. It’s a close to two-hour thrill ride. I enjoyed it, as did my wife. If you like action, this is for you.