A Working Man Review: I Was Hoping For Energy Like The Beekeeper, But This Is Just Grim And Bad

With a year-plus to reflect on it, I can say that while I didn’t much care for 2024’s The Beekeeper, I can understand why it clicked with some audiences. The film is super messy tonally, but it does make some standout efforts to be eccentric and a bit weird – with bright, neon lights, eccentric villains, and a hero who goes from being a part of an elite organization called The Beekeepers to becoming a literal apiarist. I personally didn’t click with the darkness that the movie tried to include in the mix alongside that silliness, but I get that some people did (instigating the recent development of a Beekeeper 2).

A Working Man, director David Ayer’s reunion with star Jason Statham, is a different case. It operates with the exact same hero arc – a retired elite badass gets pulled back into action when a person he cares about is imperiled – but it’s delivered this time without the energy. It’s a rote movie through and through built on tropes and lazy plotting, and unless you’re an extreme Statham apologist who simply loves it every time he is on screen punching dudes, you’re not going to find much of anything to appreciate.

Based on the novel Levon’s Trade by author Chuck Dixon, the movie features Jason Statham as Levon Cade, a retired Royal Marines commando living in Chicago trying to build a normal life for himself as a construction foreman so that he can earn full custody of his daughter (Isla Gie). Though he hopes to leave his violent past behind him, he is forced to reengage his deadly skills when Jenny (Arianna Rivas), the daughter of his employers (Michael Peña, Noemi Gonzalez), is kidnapped.

After a couple of dull and obvious scenes of Levon denying this call to action, he quickly begins his inquiry, and he begins fighting and torturing people on his way to finding out the truth about what happened to Jenny. His investigation leads him to discover that she has been abducted by a Russian organized crime outfit as part of a sex trafficking operation, and like every generic cinematic hero of the last few decades, he uses his special set of skills to shut the whole thing down.

A Working Man has two speeds: way too simple and way too complicated.

As far as putting together a story is concerned, A Working Man isn’t satisfied being dully simple or overly complicated; it manages to be both. The film’s hyper genetic opening is followed by a pattern of Levon finding a clue, torturing a person, getting another clue, and torturing another person – and in addition to being creatively uninspired, it also manages to be grisly and off-putting (Jason Statham’s particular brand of charisma is mysteriously never activated).

Then, there is oddly a point where it feels like the filmmakers realized how boring and repetitive the movie was getting and decided to make a mess of things just to suggest a creative effort. Discovering a bar with patrons who have ties to the Russian mafia, Levon orchestrates a plan that sees him pretend to be a dealer looking for a supply of blue meth (clearly script research didn’t go beyond watching episodes of Breaking Bad). To his credit, the strategy ends up working, as he ends up coming face-to-face with the villain for whom he has been searching, but the path of the narrative is ludicrous, and cut together with a minimal B-plot involving Jenny and the bungling couple that kidnaps her (Emmett J. Scanlan, Eve Mauro), the second half of A Working Man is a total mess.

The action in A Working Man is brutal but never fun.

For those who plan on going into the movie not expecting or looking for a competent story and just wanting to see some thrilling action, I have some bad news as well. It can’t be said that there is a shortage of punching, kicking, knives and guns, none of it is executed with any kind of flair or creativity – neither in the choreography nor the cinematography. It starts off on some good footing, with A Working Man leaning into its title and Levon first showing off his talents with the utilization of a bucket of nails and a pickaxe, but the notion of the blue collar ass-kicker doesn’t go beyond that. Statham handily wins every on-screen fight (leaving no stakes to speak of), and it’s all executed without any signature moments or clever one-liners.

Absent any kind of flash, A Working Man leans on brutality, but it gets stuck in a no man’s land in doing so. This is a movie that really could use visible broken bones, spurts of blood, and flying body parts to amp up its entertainment value, but David Ayer’s choice is to keep things grounded and real, and it has a cost: it’s only grim and never fun, and that feels like a cardinal sin in this genre.

I can’t say that A Working Man is totally without color, as there are some outrageously bad suits worn by Russian gangsters and there is one antagonist whose backroom lair is outfitted with an elaborate throne – but these are splashes that really on serve to accentuate what’s lacking in the majority of the film. It’s serious, but can’t be taken seriously, and it’s dumb but never fun. Jason Statham and David Ayer have both proven that they can do better, and this is very far removed from their best work.