How to make a movie for dads: give Jason Statham a job and a reason for revenge. In A Working Man, Statham plays Levon Cade, a Chicago construction foreman and former Royal Marine who deploys his particular set of skills to rescue his boss’s kidnapped daughter (Noemi Gonzalez) from the cartoonish Russian mob. And scene. May the dads be seated.
Based on Chuck Dixon’s 12-book run of Levon Cade stories, A Working Man is built to be a franchise starter. Initially, the project was written for television by Sylvester Stallone before David Ayer signed on to adjust and direct the screenplay for the movies. The bones of a TV show are still here, as though it’s been built to be renewed for a second season, but Ayer’s direction is briskly cinematic in his usual style of grounded and gritty filmmaking.
Brawny revenge movies are David Ayer’s bread and butter and his execution carries a winking confidence — A Working Man has no pretensions about what it needs to be, a brashly amusing crime-revenge saga. The acting is keyed into a specific register, self-aware of its overstatement, workmanlike and unfussy in its details. There are some peculiar and fun line readings and characters say things you only say in the movies like, “you’re not a cop, you’re A Working Man,” to the cheers of our audience.
It’s amusing but Cade’s job as a construction foreman is mostly not a factor in the movie, relative to his experience in the military. A Military Man. The action is shot the way Ayer always shoots it: cleanly readable context lines up violent kill-shots and emphasized brutality, all executed for effect. Some of the skills Cade falls back into are questionable: he’s quick to waterboard someone for information about the kidnapping and there’s a bit of a discomforting violent power fantasy to the movie, also par for the course with Ayer.
As a note of fascination, the costume design in A Working Man is the best aspect of the movie. Sure, costume designer Tiziana Corvisieri employed good-looking occupational fits for Statham but also went off the rails for other characters. A couple brothers belonging to the Russian mob wear hilarious tracksuits. Sometimes characters are wearing viking helmets or are designed with other peculiar accoutrements. The costuming gives the film its most visible character and is amusingly the takeaway from the movie. The choices range between eclectic and lived-in and it all plays well — the costumes also sparked verbal reactions from the audience.
A Working Man otherwise plays it straight. It’s a brawny and brash revenge movie that goes a bit overlong but somewhere in there is a lean and mean movie comparable with last year’s Ayer & Statham collaboration, The Beekeeper, a movie I continue to revisit, both ironically, and out of real enjoyment. Whether Statham plays a beekeeper, a transporter, or a working man, as long as he has a job and a reason for revenge, the rest more or less comes together. Sure, he has a whole catalogue like it, but this just adds another solid bullet point to the list, and it’s just enough to warrant a viewing.