Does anyone else think that David Ayer is going through some elaborate form of mid-life crisis? I only bring it up because after a career started on grimy, brutal crime thrillers, his last movie was a Jason Stalham-led punch-fests that saw a wealth of gaudy, upper class villains get well and truly “Stathed” in the bewildering amusing The Beekeeper. Well, if once is coincidence and twice is the rule, Ayer is a fully fledged action director now, because his latest team up with Amazon has yielded yet another Statham actioner that somehow, somehow is even more ridiculous than their previous collaboration.
There’s always been a running joke that Statham’s on screen personas have always boasted a wide range of employment opportunities (The Transporter, The Mechanic and, yes, The Beekeeper), but A Working Man seems to take it to the next level by just bluntly stating he’s in stable employment right from the off. But while this latest round of vertebrae crushing action follows all the tropes you’d except, is this one job that even Statham fans will find a chore?
As a deliriously silly set of opening credits attests, Levon Cade was once a Royal Marine Commando who now seeks the simple life working as the leader of a construction team owned by the kindly Garcia family, but once the hilariously on-the-nose montage of worksite/military imagery ends (a cement mixer/hand grenade hybrid is especially memorable), we also find that he’s got personal problems as he battles his father in law for custody of his beloved daughter after the suicide of his wife. However, while this seems like a rock solid base for some close-to-home drama, the movie fast pulls a switcheroo when Jenny, the precocious daughter of the Garcias, is kidnapped by traffickers after a night out of celebrating.
After discovering that the police don’t have the manpower to handle these types of cases, the distraught Garcias turn to Cade and beg him to renounce his more restrained outlook in favour of indulging in vast amounts of shooty bang-bang in order to return their daughter to them in one piece. After a minimal amount of soul searching abd a quick visit to his blind war buddy for a pep-talk, Levon tools up and gets down to some work that’s far dirtier than just laying amsome cement, but as he climbs the criminal ladder looking for Jenny, it turns out that his quest is going to be quite as straightforward as kicking in the door of a flop house and pulping every lowlife he finds within.
No, it turns out that the scumbags he’s looking for are only a small cog in a much larger criminal fraternity that includes hulking biker gangs and the creepier branches of the Russian Mafia. Can Levon manage to fuck up enough people in order to get Jenny back in time, or will his violent task blow back horribly on his own loved ones? Ah, who cares – it’s workin’ time!
So to cut through the bullshit like an absurdly sharp bowie knife, A Working Man may very well be the most idiotic action experience you’ll have all year. It’s shockingly dumb, willfully ugly and features a plot so poorly bolted together, you’d be enraged to discover that actual grown-up humans with jobs and mortgages wrote it; however depending on how you like your action flicks, all of the above could just as easily be a pro as it is a con. While some may instantly condemn it for being a prime example of right-wing trash that pushes a kill-em-all-and-let-God-sort-it-out sort of attitude that can only work in movies, others will eagerly defend it by saying that it’s obviously a throwback to the gloriously violent 80s and things start to make more sense when you realise that ot was co-written by Sylvester Stallone who seems to be very much in the same mood he was in when he wrote Cobra back in 1986. However all I know is, that to me, A Working Man feels more like the more low-rent actioners of the nineties such as The Glimmer Man, that featured a squinting Steven Seagal ignoring all notions of due process just so he could punch a serial killer and as a result, I got a massive blast of bone-headed nostalgia for my troubles.
Let’s make one thing abundantly clear; this is very much a case of me laughing at rather than laughing with as Ayer has managed to put together some impressively awful storytelling that turns the film into a complete mess. The aspects of him being a loving father who can’t get the rights to see his child literally is discarded within the first thirty minutes, the fact that he’s trying to hold down a normal life dissipates in twenty and roping in David Harbour to play a blind war buddy has nothing to do with anything whatsoever, but that doesn’t stop Ayer dropping these things in in a vain attempt to give his movie the illusion of depth. However, the movie really gets to flaunt it’s dumber side when it comes to it’s villains who are such an overblown, overexagerated clutch of comic book psychos, you begin to wonder if the man who wrote Training Day has lost all touch with reality completely.
While a lot of these movies tend to move with simplicity, Ayer instead needlessly complicates everything by introducing numerous different criminal fraternities (psycho bikers, a crooked Sheriff’s Department, gothic Russian mobsters) for seemingly no other reason that it pads the plot out and gives Statham waves of do-badders to eradicate in the final act in order for us to get our money’s worth. However, seeing as literally every law breaker here dresses like they’re on their way to some sort of cosplaying function, it gives the brutal happenings the feel of a cartoon – I mean why would drug dealing bikers have a throne room installed in their club house that would better suit Skeletor? Why does the most “normal” of the villains still have a tattoo on her forehead? And most chucklesome of all, why would Ayer and Stallone kit out the upper echelons of the Russian Mafia in outfits that make them look like vampires from the Matrix? In response, Statham’s character is once again another no-nonsense, blue collar dude who growls his dialogue while wind whistles out of his angular nose, but I have to say, the writers seem to be sleeping a bit on his tough guy dialogue. I mean, he can still bring the pain as he shotguns people clean across the room or liquidates the spine of a guy I once recognised from Hollyoaks, but his patter is legitimately terrible as he croaks pitiful comebacks like “good luck” and attempts to unnerve a guy by pouring too much syrup on his breakfast pancakes.
Objectively terrible to sane folk and noticably a step down from the legitimately fun The Beekeeper, the only people who will genuinely get joy from A Working Man are fanatical gun owners or people who miss the heavy handed trash we used to get during the 80s and 90s. I am obviously one of the latter and thus got the same amount of irony-tinged laughter out of the film as I did during the unfeasibly vicious final act of the last Rambo film, however, I would probably urge any and all rational people to knock a star off my rating and stay away if they hate this sort of jacked-up lunacy, because a viewing of this possibly removed as many brain cells as a right cross from the Stath-man himself.
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