Plodding A Working Man is a Sleazy Waste of Time
David Ayer is not a subtle filmmaker. Anyone who has watched even his best films — the WWII men-in-a-tank epic Fury, the aggressively dark buddy cop thriller End of Watch — would likely agree. Most of his features, even the misbegotten Suicide Squad, bathe in a moralistic muck and mire overflowing in scuzzy depravity. They are aggressively nihilistic and gleefully cruel, evocative of the dark, morally ambiguous neo-noirs of the 1970s (typically starring the likes of Gene Hackman, Waren Beatty, or Robert Redford) but only crossed with the fascistically repugnant violent excess of the bombastic actioners of the 1980s that made international sensations out of the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Ayer actually made a movie with the latter back in 2014, the director teaming up with Schwarzenegger for the underrated feel-bad dirty cop banger Sabotage. Now he’s joined forces with the former on the goofy programmer A Working Man starring Jason Statham, Ayer and Stallone teaming up to adapt author Chuck Dixon’s pulp page-turner Lenon’s Trade for the big screen. It’s a purposefully immoral endeavor, one that almost comes across like one of those Charles Bronson kill-fests financed by Cannon Films throughout the Reagan era, or even an early 1990s Warner Bros. Steven Seagal joint like Hard to Kill or Out for Justice.
The thing is, as stupefyingly silly as all of this is, it’s also unrelentingly boring. The film is a masochistic nightmare of brutality, violence, and mayhem, and as skilled as Ayer may be delivering signature set pieces of pugilistic bombast, the melodramatic filler that sits in between each sequence of gory, unhinged chaos is astonishingly dull. This 80-minute idea is stretched out to an unmerciful two hours, Statham taking his sweet time tracking down his prey while a bunch of faceless baddies do virtually nothing that could be construed as meaningful.
Freely cribbing from Taken along with several other Statham-as-nondescript-normal-guy-with-special-skills-that-make-him-dangerous titles like Safe, Redemption, Homefront (also co-written by Stallone), and last year’s The Beekeeper (also directed by Ayer), A Working Man frustratingly never finds its footing. The actor portrays former British Special Forces operative (with dual U.S. citizenship) Levon Cade. He lives out of his pickup truck and works for Chicago construction tycoon Joe Garcia (Michael Peña) as his foreman. When Joe’s college-age daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is the victim of human trafficking, he turns to Cade for assistance. Violence and death ensue.
There’s not much more to it, but that still doesn’t stop Ayer and Stallone from cramming in a plethora of subplots. Cade is in the middle of a custody battle for his wisecracking daughter Merry (Isla Gie) with the girl’s grandfather who believes the ex-soldier is suffering from undiagnosed PTSD (amongst other issues). He’s also best friends with blind veteran Gunny Lefferty (David Harbour), the pair sharing unspoken battlefield scars that make them lifelong brothers. These two tangents only add pointless minutes to the already plodding running time. The Merry insertions are especially ludicrous, and as unflappably charming as Gie might be, narrative beats that may have worked out okay in Dixon’s source material come off as half-baked and unintentionally laughable as far as Ayer’s handling of them here is concerned.
It should be said that Ayer is as good as ever at staging forcefully aggressive sequences of violence and action. Cade is even more of an unstoppable force of nature than Statham’s Adam Clay was in The Beekeeper (which is saying something). He’s like John Wick on steroids, so there’s no doubt that those who stand toe-to-toe with him will end up in a body bag. These bursts of adrenaline are irredeemably extreme, and this also makes them way more abhorrent fun than they have any right to be.
This includes a loopy climax inside a backwoods gambling hall that almost made sitting through the picture worthwhile. There’s a biker gang reminiscent of the Toecutter’s cavalier brigade from the original Mad Max. We have a vaguely Russian oligarch who feels as if they recently stepped off of the set of Eli Roth’s first Hostel. Even a pair of gun-toting assassins who are dead ringers for Uncle Fester and Lurch get involved in all the fisticuffs and pyrotechnics, the duo shooting up everyone and anyone with a cartoonishly deranged enthusiasm I found strangely impressive.
Pity it’s all in service of a lost cause. A Working Man is a sleazy waste of time.
Film Rating: 1½ (out of 4)
