Every few months, without fail, something wonderful happens in the land of cinema. A rumble is heard. A leather boot steps into frame. Somewhere, a wrench is used as a weapon, and a villain in a velvet blazer screams, “Do you know who I am?”; just before being flung out of a window by a man who has not smiled in 75 minutes of screen time. That man, of course, is Jason Statham, patron saint of vengeance, apostle of the quick uppercut, and the balletic bruiser of blue-collar justice. He is back, again, in Working Man, a title so gloriously blunt you can practically smell the drywall dust and Red Bull.
In this outing, directed by David Ayer; whose filmography can be best described as “testosterone marinated in cheap whiskey”; and co-written by Sylvester Stallone (yes, that Sylvester Stallone), Statham plays Levon Cade. And what a name. A name that feels like it should be whispered in hushed tones in biker bars and tattoo parlors. Levon Cade sounds like someone who taught your dad how to throw a punch and filed taxes under an alias.
Levon, as we meet him, is living the humble life of a construction worker; shirt tight, brow furrowed, and a past so clearly traumatic it might as well be wearing a name tag. He’s a former Marine, which in action movie logic translates to: he can kill with a pencil, his fists, or the jagged end of a broken shovel. He’s earned the respect of his foreman (Michael Peña, ever the emotional Swiss Army knife of supporting roles) and strikes up a low-key mentorship with the foreman’s daughter Jenny, played with wide-eyed sincerity by newcomer Arianna Garcia. Jenny is, of course, the type of teenage character who exists to be just sweet and spunky enough that you know she’s going to be kidnapped by Act Two. And so she is.
One night out with friends turns into a disappearance. Nobody knows who took her or why; though if you’ve seen a Jason Statham film before, you can safely bet on something involving gangsters, a windowless warehouse, and at least one very sweaty man shouting in a Slavic accent. Levon Cade’s retirement is officially over. What follows is a genre greatest-hits compilation: gritty neon club scenes, grimy back-alley interrogations, and a man walking purposefully toward camera in slow motion while something explodes behind him. It’s an R-rated ballet of blood, bruises, and barbed wire. Working Man is not here to reinvent anything. It’s here to remind you that sometimes all you need is one emotionally repressed man and a large monkey wrench to set things right.
Ayer directs the action with his usual brand of street-lit sincerity, coating every frame in oil-slick shadows and thick atmosphere. You can almost feel the cigarette smoke and the morally compromised tattoos. Stallone’s script, bless it, stitches together grunts and gunfire with a few growled monologues about doing what’s right. It’s not Shakespeare, but it knows its audience. You don’t come to a Statham-Stallone joint for dialogue; you come for duct-tape justice.
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What Working Man does best, though, is indulge in its cartoonish villains. These aren’t just bad guys; they’re theme park attractions. There’s a giant black biker dude with who sits on an iron throne in the back of a dive bar, a pair or henchmen named Viper and Artemis and traffics in very illegal hobbies, and several Third Act bosses who utilize medieval weapons and seem to have been raised exclusively on Mountain Dew and bare-knuckle boxing. Each one is dispatched in increasingly creative ways; none of which would pass any HR protocol, but all of which feel deeply satisfying.
And through it all, Statham remains the eye of the storm. There are no cheesy one-liners, no meta jokes. Just that steely gaze, that coiled fury, and that calm, British cadence that somehow makes murder sound gentlemanly. He is a man of few words and many contusions.
Now, if you’re the kind of person who requires logic, emotional depth, or thematic closure from your action movies, this is not your film. There is a plot, yes, and something resembling character development. But it’s all just scaffolding; scaffolding for Jason Statham to leap off of, elbow first, into the sternum of an armed goon.
What makes Working Man stand out in a sea of action films; especially the overly sanitized PG-13 breed; is its commitment to old-school brutality. There’s blood. There’s swearing. There are clearly non-union extras being thrown through plate-glass windows with alarming regularity. It’s not gritty in the modern, prestige-drama way. It’s gritty in the Die Hard 2 way. The way that reminds you of renting VHS tapes on a Friday night and watching them while your microwave popcorn burned slightly.
It helps that the movie knows when to laugh at itself. Ayer and Stallone sprinkle just enough absurdity into the chaos; a bad guy cut in half by a sharp blade, a henchman accidentally shooting himself there; to let the audience know they’re in on the joke. This is not nihilism. This is pulp. Glorious, dumb, balletic pulp.
And when the final showdown comes; Statham vs. all the sins of the modern world, in an abandoned mansion straight out of a John Wick IKEA catalog; you’ll be grinning. Not because it’s new. But because it’s familiar. Comforting. Like an old pair of combat boots or that one punch combo you’ve seen in every Statham movie since The Transporter.
Working Man won’t win an Oscar, or change the trajectory of anyone’s career, or inspire thinkpieces on the state of masculinity in post-industrial America (though I’m sure someone will try). But it does exactly what it promises on the tin: it Works, Man.
