Jason Statham and Sylvester Stallone have teamed up for an action spectacle: A Working Man is very entertaining for genre fans. And unnecessarily complicated.
Jason Statham fights his way through the area, the story comes from Sylvester Stallone, and The Beekeeper director David Ayer is in the director’s chair: A Working Man
has the best conditions an action movie could ever wish for. And indeed, it offers 116 minutes of down-to-earth popcorn entertainment for those who have always liked Statham’s B-movies. However, if you look more closely, you will be quite frustrated by at least one thing. The film has been in cinemas since March 26.
That’s what A Working Man with Jason Statham is about
Levon Cade (Statham) has left his days as an elite soldier in the British Royal Marines behind him and works as a foreman for a construction company. When the company’s daughter (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped by smugglers and the police fail to take action, Cade reactivates his murderous talents to save the young woman.
All Statham fans will understand in a split second what kind of movie this is. As in The Beekeeper, The Expendables or The Mechanic, Statham embodies an unstoppable killing machine that, due to its soft core, cuts a swath of destruction through various demographics. For most fans, it’s not important whether this is a revolutionary work of art, but whether the action can entertain. And it can.
A Working Man has two great action strengths
Director David Ayer stages fast-paced fight scenes whose high degree of violence gives them additional momentum. When Cade mixes it up with bikers with broken bottles or takes apart the Russian mafia with a sniper rifle and a trench knife, the pure uncompromising nature of the film entertains every fan of the genre.
Incidentally, the film’s production design looks good enough to give it a glossy finish. A red-tinted bar cave with skulls and chrome trim, a repulsive torture dungeon for the super-rich, or a simply authentic construction site: many settings stand out for their aesthetics. And if they don’t, at least they don’t drag the viewer out of the movie with their ugliness.
A Working Man has a problem: an unnecessarily complicated script
So if you like Jason Statham’s down-to-earth action flicks, A Working Man will keep you entertained. That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have its flaws, though: on the contrary, the biggest one stands in the way of pure action fun. The whole script is just unnecessarily complicated.
Diverse levels of the Russian mafia, business connections between bikers, drug couriers, perverse super-rich and gangsters, spoiled gangster children with drug problems, corrupt cops: all characters that appear in rapid succession but have no bearing on the actual plot. Perhaps Ayers wanted to depict an entire, semi-mythological criminal world, modeled on John Wick. In fact, though, you just find yourself wondering why the script introduces so many inconsequential characters.
Moreover, politically speaking, A Working Man can only be called dusty, to say the least: people with immigrant roots are either criminals or helpless, and only the rugged white loner can save them. The state is incompetent or corrupt. And women have nothing better to do than be beaten or kidnapped. A Working Man would have been better off taking the dramaturgical straightforwardness of John Wick: Chapter 4 as a model than the questionable morality of Rambo: Last Blood.
But it would be absurd to be surprised by that: there are enough examples in the filmographies of Stallone, Statham or Ayer that work according to very similar criteria. A Working Man doesn’t surprise with politics or straightforward form, but with hand chases, shotgun volleys and blood splatter. The film may be overambitious, but it knows its audience well.
A Working Man has been showing in cinemas since March 26, 2025.
