A Working Man (dir. David Ayer)

Written by Tom Augustine.

One of the things I love about Jason Statham is the names of the characters he plays. Going back through his recent roles on Wikipedia is a smorgasbord. Chev Chelios, Terry Leather, Arthur Bishop, Lee Christmas, Deckard Shaw, Orson Fortune, Adam Clay: these are the names of action heroes, dammit. In an age of po-faced über-seriousness characterised by Zack Snyder and the John Wick series, it’s a joy to see Statham continue to carve out a niche for high-calorie cheeseball actioners of the kind that once starred Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Van Damme (the excellent, furrowed-brow Guy Ritchie heist film Wrath of Man being the exception that proves the rule). Statham is a strong performer when he wants to be — his collaborations with Ritchie and the Crank series a showcase for unexpected range — but he’s in his element playing granite-faced dispellers of justice, usually aligned with a vigilante, outside-of-the-law kind of moral certitude. Unlike Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Statham rarely plays police or government agents (though his martial arts and combat skills are usually explained away by some past military service). Indeed, he seems far more comfortable playing thieves (The Bank Job, Operation Fortune, The Italian Job, Wrath of Man, the Fast series), hitmen and working class heroes (The Beekeeper being the most recent) as representatives of the long arm of the law. In a long, consistent career, Statham’s recent output has felt like an apotheosis — a genuine distillation of the kinds of films he’s been pumping out since the Transporter series of the early 2000s. Last year’s The Beekeeper was a particular, gnarly highlight, keying in to populist everyman resentment for shadowy, callous powers-that-be and greedy opportunists by conjuring an avenging angel to dole out punishment on a grand scale (that could be read as either right or left-wing wish fulfilment, depending on the angle). 

That film was directed by David Ayer, a director most-known for a godawful Suicide Squad film that unleashed the infamous Jared Leto Joker upon the world and the godawful Bright, which unleashed Max Landis upon the public consciousness; but who hits upon something far more interesting when he commits to down’n’dirty sleaze action with extremely muddy politics. Ayer, a kind-of mainstream iteration of S. Craig Zahler (and the one-time writer of Training Day and the original The Fast and the Furious), is one of the more keyed-in modern filmmakers when it comes to depictions of the working class (though, as said, his politics can be hard to parse). His films often focus on street-level crime and action, as in solid work like End of Watch or the tar-black Agatha Christie mashup Sabotage, and those who opine for the days when the Fast series was simply about street-racing probably owe Ayer a debt of gratitude. As the title suggests, A Working Man is a continuation and distillation of these ideas present in both director and actor’s oeuvre. The absolute disdain with which this film (as with The Beekeeper) treats the wealthy and powerful — the ‘elite’, to use a common reactionary parlance — is palpable. That’s not to say that Statham’s films are paragons of progressivism, far from it — the presence of Trump’s ‘Hollywood ambassador’ Sylvester Stallone as both writer and producer should immediately dispel that notion — but there’s still something gratifying in the Ayer/Statham collaborations’ commitment to everyday people of every stripe, amplifying the value and morals of working communities, as opposed to the vast networks that seem more and more committed to crushing them. Despite Stallone’s presence, there’s a strong current of diversity and multiculturalism in A Working Man, which depicts ex-military warrior Levon Cade now overseeing a construction site largely populated and owned by Latin Americans who speak their own language. To love action cinema is to accept said political and discursive muddiness — these films tap into simplified, instinctual understandings of violence and justice, but are not so easily housed within one school of thought or the other. This is part of their magic.

After their surprisingly successful collaboration on last year’s righteous, thumping The Beekeeper, rightful king of modern action Jason Statham and in-his-element action savant David Ayer return for A Working Man, a satisfying, endearingly oddball high-calorie feast. Keying into the greasy joys of eighties action flicks, it’s yet another win for Statham, one of the most consistent presences in modern genre cinema.

A Working Man finds Cade years outside of lengthy service with the British Royal Marines, now grappling with PTSD and the loss of his wife to suicide. His daughter Merry (Isla Gie) now lives with her upper class, artsy-fartsy grandfather (Richard Heap), who has hired a team of lawyers to cut Cade out of his daughter’s life, citing the way violence seems to follow him around. Cade has found work with the Garcia family (Michael Peña and Noemi Gonzalez), who own a hardworking, ‘family-oriented’ construction company (yes, Ayer and co. stretch the limits of working class relatability, but hey, it works). Cade, indebted to the family for caring for him after the death of his wife, is called back into action when their daughter Jenny (a spunky Ariana Rivas) is kidnapped by human traffickers. With the help of blinded-in-combat fellow ex-soldier Gunny (David Harbour), Cade morphs into a detective-slash-grim reaper, following Jenny’s trail through swathes of traffickers, biker gangs and Russian mafiosos. What’s most endearing about A Working Man is just how strange the underworld Cade descends into is, contrasting violently with Statham’s upright action-hero normalcy. There’s a heightened, dare-I-say expressionistic sensibility to the hellish backwoods hideouts Cade ventures into, and the cartoonishly villainous heavies and underbosses he encounters along the way only add to this heightened feeling of a world teetering off its axis. Naturally, this culminates in a final twenty minutes of cathartic carnage, but when one considers the opening twenty minutes of the film in contrast, it’s jarring to reckon with just how stylistically wild Ayer’s film has become over the course of two hours. Case-and-point — the moon. A biker bar saloon that seems to be modelled on the War Boys enclave of Mad Max: Fury Road paves way to a middle-of-the-woods hideout that also doubles as a prohibition-era style casino complete with flappers in chintzy on-the-town looks, all cast in streaky moonglow by a preposterously large moon that hovers out of focus throughout the final third of the film, so large that at times it looks like a giant illuminated billboard. A scene in which Cade charges into a house on fire takes on a hazy red hellishness, amplified by posters of Tod Browning’s Dracula adorning the walls. Ayer even briefly dips into John Wick style neon combat for an assault on a Russian mob boss’ nightclub fortress. 

If one of the great lost elements of eighties and nineties action cinema was the superb faces of the heavies and henchmen, A Working Man follows The Beekeeper’s lead in producing some truly superb specimens for Statham to pummel into the dust. Reliable character actor Jason Flemyng is just the beginning of this cavalcade — there are hollow-eyed, machine-gun toting Russian hitmen, a hulking ex-commando turned drug kingpin, and a pair of tattooed traffickers working for a moustache-twirling sexual deviant that seem to be modelled on Boris, Natasha and Fearless Leader from the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. Harbour, in a small but memorable supporting role, provides a warm, brotherly corollary to this; as Cade’s ‘weapons sommelier’, Harbour is clearly having a ball, but brings genuine affection to his interactions with Statham that ensure that the film’s lowkey, return-to-normalcy final sequence shifts into suddenly, surprisingly moving territory. A Working Man is perhaps a little messier, a little less muscular than The Beekeeper, but there’s a more emotional undercurrent that flows through it, typified by the same element that ensured the Fast series’ durability: the value of the found family. There may be better action films this year, but I doubt there’ll be many I could sit down and watch again right now, or ones to which I’d happily commit to watching countless direct-to-video sequels. Ten more, please. 

A Working Man is in cinemas now.

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