He's going to seize the means of production and collectivise
profit sharing for the proletariat!
dir: David Ayer
2025
Whoa whoa whoa whoa he’s A Working (Class) Man.
I’m the first to admit that when you buy a ticket to a Jason Statham movie, to act surprised that it’s like every other Jason Statham movie is a bit disingenuous, a bit deliberately naïve.
“Sure, the other twenty Statham movies I’ve seen him in have him playing an isolated stoic loner with super killing skills who comes out of retirement / obscurity to save / protect / kidnap a girl / get revenge, but then I watched the latest one and it was exactly the same as all the others!”
It’d be like watching any American movie and being amazed when guns appear.
Guns? I didn’t sign up for this!
Instead of saying this is like every other Jason Statham movie ever made, I’m just going to say it is almost indistinguishable from his last film, being The Beekeeper, except there are no bee puns at all. At All. And no Jeremy Ironses doing appalling American accents.
Speaking of which, Statham thankfully also doesn’t do an American accent, preferring to play a character that is a Brit and who served loyally for 20 years as a Royal Marines commando, killing the empire’s enemies around the globe with style, grace and presumably crumpets and cucumber sandwiches on tap.
Through this heroic work, as the gobsmackingly awful opening credit animations inform us, he bonded with his American military equivalents, a bond that has not faded yet though his service has ended, and he carries that work ethic through to his current type of employment, being hard labour.
Now, he is the working man of the title, in that he works in construction, which is fine.
I mean, if you’re a weirdo like me you could spend a whole chunk of time wondering why they went with this angle, and what it “means” to posit that a character working nobly with his hands (he’s a site manager / foreman, he doesn’t need to actually use his hands in theory). That kind of sociological pondering would amuse me perhaps the more I indulged in it, but it wouldn’t really give much of an indication as to whether this flick warrants a viewing, or whether it is terrible trash with no redeeming qualities. To point out that someone involved in this is fetishising the idea of a working class man without having any desire to depict a working class man in any way means “working man” is a costume, like “fireman”, “sexy nurse” or “stripper cop”, with no further depth to it.
And even then, if I teased out all the nuances of why you would emphasise that he’s a guy working in construction who uses tools and such for work and then for killing / righteous vengeance, it would still seem pointless when you realise how flimsy the window dressing is, and how uncommitted they are to actually “telling” a story about a working class man trying to achieve “justice” against rich criminals.
When the film starts the main chap Levon Cade (Statham) is sleeping in his massive RAM pick up truck, and then opens the gates at his place of work for the other workers to file through. Why’s he sleeping in his car? Well, he’s not getting paid enough clearly by this family who employee him, otherwise his living wage would be enough for him to rent somewhere and maintain a certain standard of living. They do show him renting a tenement flat with a blood-soaked mattress at one point, but I couldn’t tell you why. There’s literally two scenes shot in that set, and I could not explain what purpose they serve, because one can put together a crazy wall of photos and post-it notes anywhere.
He has a primary / elementary school age daughter who he shares custody with, get this, her hostile grandfather. Now that’s a turn-up for the books. The girl’s rich grandfather throws elaborate parties on the days when Merry (Isla Gie) is meant to have visitations with her dad, and it’s all calculated to show how tough it is for Levon because he’s not a wealthy man.
His employer, played by Michael Peña, is one of those awful bosses who tells employees they’re part of a family, which means they can expect to be routinely underpaid and exploited. He has a daughter called Jenny (Arriana Rivas), who gets kidnapped by Russian goons when she’s out partying with her friends.
The purpose of her kidnapping is some variation of awful human trafficking, but her fate, whether it’s to be sexually assaulted or murdered or both, plays into the natural fears of any parent whose child, even if they’re an adult, doesn’t respond to a text message within 10 or so minutes.
The father implores Levon to find his daughter. Levon says “no, sorry, can’t do that”.
And then minutes later he’s talking with his blind friend who he served with (David Harbour), which indicates, yes, he will track down Jenny and save her from a fate worse than and including death.
Who are the bad people in this flick? Well, here’s where I am going to deviate from every other review that I ever got to read about this movie, by saying something no one else will admit to. Sure, the antagonists are mostly Russians or Russian adjacent, but I swear to all the gods that to me it feels like maybe they were going to make a flick with vampire gangs fighting over the drugs and sex slaves trade in Illinois. There are so many traditional goth outfits and baby / glam goth fashions on display that I swear I felt like I was watching an episode of True Blood where they decide to kill everyone off and the one to do it is an unkillable Jason Statham taking on a legion of the undead without even getting a single scratch.
Statham’s character of Levon goes from being a ‘working’ guy living out of his car, to a guy with unlimited resources who can kill anyone anywhere for any reason, who can masquerade as a drug dealer in order to… I have no idea what was happening there… to a chap who has a fleet of cars and motorbikes at his disposal. I think maybe even the people making this confused this character with one of his other characters, meaning that they didn’t notice if some of his actions, clothing etc could have been from one of the Fast & Furious movies.
The process the flick goes through is the process that every flick of this type goes through: attack people you think might have been responsible, kill them, get lead to next target. But quite often they’re dead ends, literally and figuratively, so he has to randomly go in a different direction and kill some other henchpeople in order to get another lead. All of these scenes, just like in The Beekeeper are mostly just watching Statham kill people. Not fight people, as in there’s very little actual fight choreography. There’s just Statham shooting this person, drowning this other person, punch-kicking and kick-punching others, rinse, repeat.
I can’t remember him getting hit, like barely once or twice. Towards the end there are fights which go on a bit longer where it’s part of a sequence, like when he kills two luxury tracksuit wearing jerks in the back of a van, or his fight with the large drug dealer as the flick’s strange visceral pre-climax climax. Really, it’s just butchery for most of the flick, and not even filmed that well or that compellingly.
Because there is the strange element with the Russians dressed like counts and baronesses, I had hoped that one of them, any of them would have had some personality, but I don’t think the budget allowed for that. There are these goons that are meant to stand out, but really none of them do, because they barely manage one-note performances, even if they have tattoos on their foreheads or long coats out of the Matrix movies.
The lack, the real absence, is felt in the script. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I find out that a screenplay has been put together by Sylvester Stallone, I expect there to be the emotional complexity of an Anne Enright novel pared with the deeply felt philosophical musings of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Instead we get lines like “Look at them bricks. You ain’t no cop, you’re A Working Man!”
Or dialogue like:
“You murdered your way in, you might just have to murder your way out.”
- “I was thinking the same thing.”
I suspect that not that much actual thinking occurred during the writing process. This flick wasn’t without its lunkheaded charm, in that I watched it to the end to see the girl rescued, the baddies to get their comeuppance, and for Statham to give one of those smiles he gives (that look painful) at the end of a flick, when he can drop the perpetual look of boredom he generally wanders around with.
Flicks like this, well, they’re pretty dumb, and they ask almost nothing of their audience other than to keep sitting there passively allowing it to penetrate our heads through our eyeballs, all the pointless and noxious noise to sit like lazy cats in our ear canals, and then wonder during the end credits as we’re muttering “that’s all? That’s it?” whether we’re going to get another snack or shot of Bailey’s Irish Cream before bed.
And nothing more.
5 times saying something wasn’t even as fun/enjoyable as something as dumb as The Beekeeper is an indictment of our entire species out of 10
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“Money doesn’t give a fuck where it comes from!” - A Working Man
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