Never let it be said that Jason Statham is not a working man because for the past twenty years he’s been banging out actioners at a rate of at least one per year but usually more. His latest seems him reuniting with David Ayer as director and his ex-Expendables co-star Sylvester Stallone only this time as writer based on a series of books ‘Levon’s Trade’ and his trade is carnage.
In previous films we’ve seen Statham as a mechanic, a spy, an oceanographer and of course what else but a beekeeper but his latest job is a construction foreman and like so many of his other roles it’s a cover for what he really is – a lean mean fighting machine and his former job here was as a British marine with a set of enviable fighting and weaponry skills. But as he says, ‘It’s not who I am anymore’ a claim that would only be less believable if it was said by Meghan Markle and it’s not long before he’s back to his old ways when the daughter of his boss goes missing on a night out and her parents, only too aware of his worst kept secret, get him to go find her.
Infiltrating the underworld with surprising ease and leaving the first of a number of bodies in his wake that sees his boss’s daughter has been kidnapped for human tracking purposes by the Russian mafia. And so he works his way through the mob that’s includes mob boss Wolo (Jason Flemying reuniting albeit briefly, with Statham for the first time since ‘Snatch’) his son Didi (Maximilian Osonsli) and a whole host of other Russians many of which wear clothes made from 1970’s Fleur de Lys wallpaper and all of them will meet the obligatory brutal demise. He’s assisted by David Harbour as Gunny, a now blind veteran, who Statham’s character had saved in a previous mission with a similar role to the armoury sommelier in John Wick and the film would have benefitted from more screen time with him.
The dialogue is frequently bizarre – a stand out being, ‘He is small potatoes. I’m the big potatoes!’, the plotting gets a little muddled and the action occasionally gets a little generic. As a single widowed father Statham’s character also has a daughter now being raised by her granddaughter who is vehemently opposed to Statham having custody over her and a side story of him legally trying to do this is limited to one scene and then ignored.
But Statham is as reliably awesome as might be expected despite him edging (almost unbelievably) towards 60 years of age with the film culminating in the obligatory bullet riddled, body strewn climax. A Working Man is the second consecutive film that the star has made with director David Ayer after last years The Beekeeper but this does not reach the dizzy heights of that film but for now it’s a place holder until that films inevitable sequel.
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Here’s A Working Man trailer…..
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