“At best this could be a Jason Statham movie,” reads a two-star Goodreads review of Levon’s Trade, the first of 12 novels following the exploits of Royal Marines commando-turned-construction worker-turned-vigilante Levon Cade. Well, congratulations to that clairvoyant user, because Levon’s Trade has now become the Jason Statham vehicle A Working Man – though the word “best” doesn’t belong anywhere in the conversation about it. The British action star can do, and has done, much better than this raggedy and aesthetically unpleasing adaptation, a lousy extension of his creative partnership with The Beekeeper director David Ayer (who performs the same role here) and his fellow Expendable Sylvester Stallone (who co-wrote the script with Ayer).
It starts off well enough, with Levon demonstrating his unique skillset on some nameless thugs trying to rough up one of his construction co-workers. He swiftly deals with them by throwing a bucket of nails, a bag of cement, and a fair few punches – choreography that makes fun use of the tools around him. But the fights grow excruciatingly dull from there. After Jenny (Arianna Riva), the teenage daughter of his boss, Joe (Michael Peña), is kidnapped, Levon investigates her disappearance, a quest that puts him in the unimaginatively depicted crosshairs of a one-dimensional drug-dealing biker gang, cartoonish human traffickers, and a Russian mafia brotherhood seemingly ripped off from the John Wick franchise.
The later parts of A Working Man lack thrills because there’s never any sense that Levon is genuinely in danger. He’s so superhumanly efficient and deadly, he makes easy work of every goon who squares up to him. Even Dutch (Chidi Ajufo), a drug baron and fellow former marine who spends most of his time sitting on a ridiculous chrome throne in the back of a biker bar, lasts about five seconds against our hero.
But it’s mostly over-zealous editing and tight framing of the gritty, unflatteringly colored images on screen that do Statham a disservice. He battles bad guys in the back of a van and Dutch’s bar without any of the visual finesse, thrilling use of space, or playfulness that we’ve seen in his past films like War, or in the Transporter and Fast and Furious franchises. A Working Man is very bash, bash, bash, break, break, break – copy-and-paste choreography that only grows lazier across a 116-minute runtime. That tediousness even sucks the life out of the operatic setup for Levon’s climactic confrontation with the bad guys, which takes place in an old house fit for a Meat Loaf video (complete with a piano on which Jenny, in one heavy-handed scene shoehorned between fight sequences, performs Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata). This should be the staging ground for some over-the-top entertainment, but sadly it’s not.
For all the ass-kicking qualifications Ayer and Stallone bring to a character like Levon (only to squander them), they’re not entirely equipped to deal with what makes him tick. Whatever he got up to in his previous 22 years of military service left Levon with untreated PTSD and violent rage, a mental-health issue that’s never really made clear in Statham’s drier-than-usual performance. It is used against him in a battle over custody of his daughter, Merry (Isla Gie), though. Levon’s wife’s offscreen death by suicide makes room for this threadbare subplot; “she battled depression” is all the explanation given. The bland direction of a scene where Merry tells her dad, “I’m mad at mama for dying,” offers zero emotional depth nor room exploration as the story progresses, typical of A Working Man’s laughable attempts to fill out its characters.
It’s also emblematic of the unintentional knee-slappers that clutter Stallone and Ayer’s script. “I don’t trust people, I trust biology,” Levon tells a drug-dealing bartender at one point. (Your guess as to what that means is as good as mine.) Stranger Things’ David Harbour makes an appearance as one of Levon’s former military comrades; after reflecting on how he’s still alive thanks to Levon, Statham comes in with a flat delivery of “I’m sorry I couldn’t save your eyes.” You’ll be forgiven for rolling yours.
A Working Man tops off its feeble fights, clumsy dialogue, and caricatured villains with some pretty outlandish costume choices. Peña seems to wear the same shirt and tie in all of his scenes, while Jenny and her college gal pals dress like middle-aged paralegals for a night out. (Has anyone involved with this movie met Gen Z?) Then there are the flamboyant tracksuits a pair of Russian mobsterswear for a joke that never lands, and the cheap-looking goth attire of the henchmen. It’s an ill-conceived world where everyone looks like guests at a fancy dress party no one quite understands the theme of.
VERDICT:
Score: 3
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