There’s something to be said for a movie whose emotional high point might be Jason Statham saying good-bye to his gun. The gun in question is an M-14, a rifle that Statham’s character, Levon Cade, is almost queasily familiar with from his 22 years in the military, and it’s the weapon he chooses before going off to mow down the nest of Russian gangsters and drug dealers and human traffickers he’s found himself at war with. But the rifle’s symbolic value is complicated. Levon, we’re told, has untreated post-traumatic stress and brain trauma from his service; that’s why he lost custody of his young daughter after the untimely death of his wife. And like many an action hero, when we first meet him, Levon has been trying to leave that past behind, opting instead to work quietly as a foreman at a family construction firm owned by his friend Joe Garcia (Michael Peña). The M-14 represents the life he left behind, and his eventual farewell to it suggests, perhaps, a more hopeful finality.
A Working Man, of course, is not really about trauma or the ghosts of the past or the spiritual toll of violence or anything like that. Quite the contrary: It’s about the exaltation of ass-kicking, and Statham and director David Ayer (working off a script he co-wrote with Sylvester Stallone, based on Chuck Dixon’s novel Levon’s Trade, the first of 12 books featuring Cade) make sure that we feel the visceral thrill of every arm snap, every neck stab, every head shot. Ayer also directed last year’s The Beekeeper, and much like that film, A Working Man features Statham as an initially reluctant lone angel of the apocalypse reactivating his special set of skills and making his way up the chain of an alternate, hermetically sealed world of smug villainy.
In The Beekeeper, it was reptilian tech bros preying on ordinary citizens — though the scale of the conspiracy eventually reached gloriously absurd heights, with even the president of the United States getting involved. (Slimy tech bros colluding with a president? Ridiculous!) In A Working Man, it’s human traffickers who kidnap girls at random from bars, though in this case they’re also plugged into a network of gangsters living in their own echo chamber of arcane rules and garish fashions. When Levon pummels the shit out of two Russian goons, we want him to get an extra couple of punches in to punish them for their silly bucket hats and their pale, matching, grotesque paisley outfits. (When one protests that it’s their own fashion brand, we lust just a little more for their execution.) The villains in this movie aren’t merely cruel and sadistic; they’re also profoundly stupid and incompetent, which actually feels closer to the way things tend to be in the real world.
A Working Man is not trying to be realistic, however, which is interesting given that Ayer initially made his name with gritty urban dramas like Harsh Times and End of Watch, movies that wore their street-level authenticity on their sleeves. Here, he uses the iconography of fairy tales to give Levon’s actions a mythical kick. An enormous full moon the size of Jupiter presides over the final act. The climax takes place in a large house lit and made up like a temple with giant torches outside. One baddie, the leader of a biker gang, wears a horned helmet and sits on a motorcycle throne with flaring pipes and pistons. Another is draped in what appears to be a long, black, crushed-vinyl overcoat. The whole film feels like it takes place in an alternate universe, so that Levon’s stoic, no-nonsense bruiser cuts through it not just narratively but graphically. Much like the storybook mayhem of the first John Wick, A Working Man isn’t afraid to make its spectacles of slaughter visually enchanting.
This also gets to something at the heart of Statham’s persona, which he has honed exceptionally well in recent years. The crouched, whirlwind fighting techniques give him the appearance of an action figure come to life, conveying comedy and menace in equal measure and allowing us to enjoy the slaughter with an easy conscience. And his icy glare combines Buster Keaton’s great stone face with something more timeless, like one of those huge statues one finds on Mount Nemrut or Easter Island. We can project feelings onto the purposefully blank canvas of Statham’s visage — be they a longing for normality, a lust for violence, or something else — which makes him both the funniest and the saddest of action heroes. When he bids adieu to that M-14, don’t be surprised if you find yourself simultaneously chuckling and choking up a little.
