‘A Working Man’ Review: For Jason Statham, Revenge Is a Dish Served Dead Behind the Eyes

Jason Statham’s Levon Cade isn’t just a simple “working man.” Sure, he’s putting in the sweat equity as a foreman at his friend Joe’s (Michael Peña) construction company, but it’s not long into David Ayer’s film before we learn of his past as a highly trained and decorated member of the British military. Full of close-ups of bullets, dog tags, helmets, and British and American flags, the opening credits serve up a barrage of images of military fetishization, only for the film to leave us with the realization that Levon’s service was underappreciated.

Not only is Levon blamed by his rich ex-father-in-law (Richard Heap) for the death of his mother—she committed suicide while he was serving overseas—but his lawyers suggest that his untreated PTSD will make it difficult for him to get custody of his daughter (Isla Gie). The notion of a veteran forced to confront such challenges appears to be setting up some sort of emotional payoff, but once it’s revealed that Joe’s daughter (Arianna Rivas) has been forced into a sex-trafficking ring, thus kicking a quest for vengeance into motion, our hero’s familial turmoil and the weight of his past are almost completely sidelined for the rest of the film.

Instead of grappling with Levon’s PTSD, A Working Man views it as something of a superpower that helps him navigate an underworld of drug dealers and sex traffickers. It’s a cop-out that smooths the edges off the character, as it reduces him to just another run-of-the-mill avenging angel. The man’s wartime experience clearly colors the events of the film, as in a scene where Levon waterboards a Russian mobster, but the film is less interested in presenting his actions as evidence of his lingering psychological anguish than it is in celebrating his vigilantism.

A Working Man, adapted by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone from Chuck Dixon’s novel Levon’s Trade, fails to offer anything that allows it to distinguish itself in the crowded genre of revenge films besides its retrograde politics. At times, the amount of enemies that Levon has to contend with at once, as in one scene where he takes on nearly a dozen foes in a drug den, brings to mind a John Wick film. But the action is so often edited to pieces that you lose the sense of spatial continuity and coherence that makes the combat in Chad Stahelski’s series so visceral.

Here and there, and for the better, the film flirts with camp. Demi (Maximilian Osinski), son of Russian oligarch Wolo (Jason Felmyng), is at one point dressed like a British mod, while two of his goons (Greg Kolpakchi and Piotr Witkowski) often wear similar paisley tracksuits. Elsewhere, another bruiser (Ricky Champ), with his bald head and ridiculous black outfit, looks eerily similar to a thinner version of Baron Harkonnen in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films. But that flair in the costuming doesn’t spill over into the rest of the film, which remains frustratingly dour and monotonous even as its overstuffed plot becomes more and more ridiculous.

Flashes of humor break up the doldrums, as when Levon punches Wolo in the face before then toasting and eating a bagel in front of him. But such moments are few and far between, and quickly drowned out by A Working Man’s self-seriousness and mind-numbing celebration of a type of mentality that sees things like PTSD as weaknesses to be cast aside. That isn’t to suggest that brawny meatheads like Levon don’t have their place in action cinema, but when a film is as dead behind the eyes as its protagonist, that’s a difficult barrier for audiences to overcome.