by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jason Statham, Arianna Rivas, Jason Flemyng, Michael Pena, Merab Ninidze
Intro:
… a workmanlike action flick.
Fresh off delivering the dumb, fun, and oddly prescient The Beekeeper (political corruption connected to Silicon Valley? Sounds familiar…), director David Ayer and star Jason Statham are back at it again. Adapting Levon’s Trade, a late-period novel from Chuck “I miss the Comics Code” Dixon, with Sly Stallone himself co-writing alongside Ayer, this slots next to Taken much like The Beekeeper slotted next to John Wick.
The Beekeeper showed Statham at his best as an action lead, and there are visible attempts to flesh that out in A Working Man. As we see Statham’s Levon go on his one-man rampage against human traffickers, the film around him flirts with examining his violent past (and soon-to-be-present) and how to reconcile it with his (albeit strained) family life as a civilian.
Sly Stallone as writer pulls from his own history with mentally scarred characters like Rocky and Rambo to add flickers of psycho-drama to the mix, but that’s really all they end up amounting to: flickers. There are moments that you would think a film that pushes two hours would have time to properly explore (why bring things up just to not do anything with them?), but sadly, the result is half-baked.
Then again, it can be difficult to discern just how seriously this is all meant to be taken, right from the literal beginning with Jared Michael Fry’s overwrought soundtrack playing against a wash of symbolic but ultimately inconsequential imagery. It’s a black-and-white world where human traffickers both speak and dress like you could pick them out from orbit as being up to no good, and enhanced interrogation techniques are a-okay because, um, main character. It shows shades of the colourful grit that went into Dixon’s work on the Bat-family comics in the ‘90s, but not only does the drama feel tacked-on but the attempts at humour often come across as forced. “I am the big potatoes” is the kind of line that makes one miss all those damn bee puns.
But that’s all the extraneous stuff; how is it as a simple action flick? Well, it certainly has its wincers with its bloodiness, but those who like variety in their throwdowns and shootouts might walk away disappointed. It’s also shot with a lot of shaky-cam, meaning that quite a bit of the choreography gets lost in the motion blur, even with how meat-and-big-potatoes they are in terms of staging.
Statham still sells it as a badass, and Arianna Rivas as the trafficked Jenny also holds her own (props for not just making her entirely passive, as these stories tend to do), but despite the liberal lifting from John Wick’s neon colour palette and ostentatious set design for the bigger set pieces, they’re not likely to stick in the mind for long.
A Working Man is a workmanlike action flick. Much like with Stallone’s previous attempt at Takensploitation with Rambo: Last Blood, it mostly plays it safe as ultraviolent power fantasy, and the pockets where it does try something different come across as jarringly goofy compared to the air it carries itself with. As a popcorn distribution system, Statham does a lot of the carrying while the rest of the cast just manages with what they’ve been handed, but after how surprisingly enjoyable Beekeeper turned out, this feels like the two shared names are already moving backwards.
