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Go behind the scenes of A Working Man with director David Ayer and some of the supporting cast
Featurette: Universal Pictures

A Working Man (2025)
Directed by David Ayer
Rated R
Fired 28 March 2025
#AWorkingMan

A Working Man should be served his walking papers.

Taken

Okay. It’s a Jason Statham movie. That excuses some things (rinse-and-repeat plot, bloody action, stoicism beyond all reason, facial hair that is inexplicably perfectly groomed against all odds, superficial respect for veterans). But some things are inexcusable. There is virtually nothing memorable about this exercise in excessive violence that features something of a cinematic triple threat: it stars Jason Statham, it's directed by David Ayer and the screenplay is co-written by Sylvester Stallone with Ayer.

All three are hit-and-miss in their career track records, but the first three Expendables stand as solid action entertainment and they brought Statham and Stallone together on-screen. Statham’s also done great work in movies including The Italian Job (2003), Guy Ritchie's Wrath of Man and even the Fast & Furious spin-off Hobbs & Shaw. So, writing off A Working Man’s sins "because" it’s a Jason Statham movie is an abdication of responsibility as stewards of quality filmmaking.

Let’s get the plot out of the way. That’ll only take a sentence or two.

Levon Cade (Statham) is a 22-year veteran of the Royal Marines who’s now making ends meet as a construction manager in Chicago. The company owners’ daughter is kidnapped. Levon goes out to bring her back. A lot of people die in the process.

Sorry. That’s four third-grade level sentences.

Time Warp #1

Maybe all it would take is a little editing to make A Working Man a little more workable. It still wouldn’t be a good movie, but it’d be better.

There are two major scenes that unfold then, a minute or two later, it’s as if they never happened.

The first time this exercise in disappearing time happens is right at the opening. Levon wakes up, takes a whiff of that new truck smell then steps outside his rented F-150. Some sort of Latino mafia accosts some of the Latino construction workers. Levon steps in as a mediator and after a couple words fail to bring peace, punches are thrown. Then Levon pulls a stashed rifle out from some scaffolding. Shots are fired. The episode is deescalated, with a couple corpses as mere collateral damage.

Jenny Garcia (Arianna Rivas, The Harvest), the owners’ daughter, is advised by Levon to forget she ever saw the incident. It never happened. But, in the interest of character development, their conversation reveals Jenny had been trained by a relative in the ways of hand-to-hand combat. She can break fingers.

The problem is Levon didn’t do some demolition work and tear down the fourth wall. He didn’t tell the audience to forget what they just saw. That would’ve come in handy after Jenny goes out with some girlfriends that night and gets kidnapped outside a seedy bar with a bartender selling drugs for a little extra... uh... "beer money."

The next day, Joe Garcia (Michael Peña, Ant-Man) and his wife, Carla (Noemi Gonzalez, David Ayer’s The Tax Collector), besides themselves with grief, beg Levon to go out and find Jenny. Bring her back alive, they plead. They know his background. They know he’s the only guy in the Windy City who can blow away all the bad guys.

But — here’s the kicker — Levon says with all earnestness, "I’m a different person now."

Whuh?

In the prior 10 minutes of movie time, he pulled a rifle out of some scaffolding. Come on, guys.

Free Editing Tip #1: Start with the kidnapping. Maybe even make it part of the opening credits. The "different person" conversation follows, but before the Latino mafia episode. Make those thugs the trigger which makes Levon realize, "Hey, wait a minute, I still am that guy. Cool beans." Then have Levon go to town, so to speak, on the... gag... hack... cough... Russian mafia behind the crime ring that captured Jenny.

"This town needs an enema. I’m a working man and it’s time for me to get back to work,"
monologues the brooding vet Levon Cade, living in a rented F-150 to save a buck or two
(Matt’s version)

War and Freaks

Sigh.

Another frickin’ Russian mafia story.

Another movie that steals pages from the John Wick playbook.

Another movie overloaded with cheesy Russian caricatures checking off all the boxes under the category of stereotypes: gaudy outfits (granted, a seemingly very real problem), thick accents and an atrocious, grating amount of broken English. Even more problematic, though, is this nonsense starts to involve a brotherhood akin to Wick’s High Council, an old-school Russian mafia father whose thug sons are murdered and who wants revenge, plus a whole gaggle of laughably bad villains who make Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale look like evil geniuses.

"You and all connected with you will be hunted for three generations," says Symon Kharchenko (Andrej Kaminsky, a priest in John Wick: Chapter 4) of those involved in his sons’ grisly murders.

Whatever. Buzz off.

What’s missing?

Oh. Yeah.

Suspense.

Granted, there are a few frames wherein Statham gets to show some pain. Emotional pain, not physical pain, stemming from his post-military personal life. "It’s okay. I hurt, too," he tells his pre-teen daughter. Relish it. That’s as good as the drama gets here.

That despite a decent back story in which Levon’s wife died, possibly by suicide. But Levon’s father-in-law thinks Levon killed her and he is, out of vengeance, interfering with Levon’s visitation rights and introducing all kinds of domestic drama.

Even so, that father-in-law, Dr. Jordan Roth (Richard Heap, Archbishop Williams in one episode of The Crown), is one strange dude. Why couldn’t he be somebody a little more straightforward? Why couldn’t he be a smart, well-dressed man instead of yet another guy with godawful fashion sense and an off-kilter personality? Somebody to balance out the madness with some sort of grounding.

As it stands, all of the grounding falls on the Garcia family. At least they bring it. Joe, Carla and Jenny are the only well-adjusted, normal people in Levon’s world.

Time Warp #2

Jenny’s stuffed in a suitcase. That’s done off-camera, of course, by her kidnappers. This whole notion of the suitcase is ridiculous, but it is a soft-sided, expandable bag. So. There’s that.

Also done off-camera is her getting released from the suitcase. The zipper starts to get pulled, then cut! Off to another scene.

Well, it turns out, off-camera, of course, once Jenny is unpacked, she bites a predator who’s bought her through the Russian mafia’s sex trafficking line of business. She bites his face off, or at least does enough damage to warrant 36 stitches.

Later, after the perv decides he doesn’t want her killed, he instead wants a second date with Jenny, she is shown finally meeting him face-to-what’s-left-of-his-face. Once again faced with the prospect of spending the evening with this creep, Jenny asks, "What have I ever done to you?" He responds with, "Nothing."

What? With that Acme bandage on his left cheek? It’s another misplaced conversation.

Free Editing Tip #2: Right out of the box (or suitcase, in this scenario), Jenny is a sympathetic character. The line, "What have I ever done to you?" is intended to add to that sympathy and also put front-and-center Jenny’s innocence and complete lack of connection to her kidnappers.

We have two options to handle this dialogue. One is to have Jenny ask this of the two remarkably unconvincing and incompetent henchpeople who are her "handlers." "What have I ever done to you?"

The alternative, and preferred approach, is to go crazy and show Jenny getting pulled out of the suitcase, at which point, after maybe throwing a punch or two (tying back to her defensive training referenced earlier in the movie), she logically asks the perv, with all the venom she can muster, "What have I ever done to you?"

Then she bites his face off. On screen.

"That’s right, cheese [bleep]. That's what happens when two low-rent turds of a filthy oligarchy stuff me into a carry-on, cart me around in the trunk of a hoopdie and then unpack me in the lair of a dumpy, stumpy predatory creep like you! I AM an American and I will break you!"
– Jenny Garcia, followed by her spitting out some blood and a chunk of flesh
(Matt’s version)

Put some zing into this ditzy material, Stallone! Eye of the tiger time, baby! Make these characters come alive and crap thunder, not mouse droppings!

Moonlight Sonata

A Working Man is based on the book Levon’s Trade by Chuck Dixon. There are two things of note here. First, Dixon created the Batman villain Bane (cool). Second, there are 12 books in the Levon Cade series (holy crap, Batman!). No wonder Stallone (who allegedly offered Dixon a screenwriting gig for Expendables 2) and Ayer leaped on this pulp affliction. Thoughts of "franchise" likely danced in their heads.

But this is more like a Remo Williams one-and-done fiasco.

There's another crime being committed here. Burdened with some of the worst villains to ever grace the screen, the movie robs audiences of the anticipated giddy sense of joy in seeing the bad guys get their comeuppance. That’s the biggest sin an action movie like this could possibly make. It is, ultimately, a revenge story. And when the revenge is so hollowed out because the bad guys are so poorly crafted, what’s the point?

Not a single scene or character stands out in A Working Man. What does stand out is not flattering.

For starters, Statham’s Levon is the most colorful character in the movie. The problem is his colors are all earth tones.

There’s also a strangely conspicuous full moon that rests in the background. It’s a gigantic full moon. But it looks like a styrofoam ball dangling by a string in a grade-school stage play. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, previously played by Jenny in a recital, is sampled during the climactic massacre. It’s too late, guys. The artsy touch falls flat.

But at least the movie has one lonely joke.

As a guy who’s known to sport the peach fuzz, this writer has often admired Statham’s immaculately groomed scruff. It’s impeccable from scene to scene. Even in the thick of adventure, he keeps it perfectly trimmed to a specific millimeter. It’s so fascinatingly metrosexual. Alas, as much as this writer likes the look, there’s zero interest in putting in the effort to make it so. Regardless, there’s the joke, almost like a punchline to the whole preceding two hours. Levon, a little bruised and battered after annihilating a large collection of stupid Russians, tells his little girl he nicked himself while shaving.

Ba-da-bum. Rim shot.

Roll credits.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.

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