Review: A Working Man

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

A Working Man offers the exact sort of experience you’d expect from a film penned by Chuck Dixon and executive produced by Sylvester Stallone. This is an action flick tailor made for centrists that prefer “apolitical” entertainment—for the impressionable Twitter user that loudly condemns human trafficking and sexual assault, yet admires Andrew Tate and thinks nothing of the fact that there exists video evidence of a certain public figure introducing Jeffrey Epstein to multiple young women; for the casual cinephile that walks away from Taxi Driver convinced that Travis Bickle should be seen as an aspirational figure; for the armchair military enthusiast that sincerely believes that the most effective cure for PTSD is accepting the inevitability of man’s violent nature and aiming it towards “acceptable” targets (not exactly an uncommon trope, but especially egregious in its presentation here; despite his token protestations, our protagonist returns to bloodshed about as reluctantly as a dog dives nose first into a fresh pile of shit).

It is, at the very least, relatively inoffensive. Jason Statham has settled into his comfort zone at this point in his career, and he rarely finds an excuse to stray far from it; indeed, his character here is nearly identical to the one that he played in The Beekeeper: a former soldier/elite operative turned humble, modest, unassuming blue collar worker, who is compelled to kill again when ruthless criminals threaten an innocent acquaintance/benefactor. As you can likely ascertain from that brief synopsis, the story is a messy hodgepodge of clichés—right down to the grizzled veteran that provides our hero with sage advice, moral support, and a small arsenal of cool guns to make the finale an extra explosive affair (portrayed in this instance by David Harbour, mumbling his way through the role from behind a bushy, unkempt beard)—but that’s not necessarily a glaring blemish; the familiarity is probably by design, intended to pay homage to the movie’s obvious influences (‘70s exploitation cinema in general, and Rolling Thunder in particular).

In any case, director David Ayer’s craftsmanship is confident and competent enough to keep the formulaic plot consistently engaging (some muddy cinematography and choppy editing notwithstanding). Occasionally, the visual style even veers into outright surrealism; the spectacular climax, for example, features bikers clad in chainmail and samurai armor that look as though they accidentally wandered off the set of Mad Max—a dramatic (albeit not totally unwelcome) departure from the comparatively grounded, naturalistic tone of almost every preceding scene. And then there’s the moon, which—as many critics have astutely observed—appears to be orbiting approximately thirty feet from Earth’s surface in the background of several shots for no discernible reason (perhaps it has something to do with the use of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 as a recurring musical theme).

Ultimately, A Working Man isn’t irredeemably terrible—just utterly disposable. The Beekeeper had the advantage of being completely batshit insane, which made it memorable; this, on the other hand, is an aggressively pedestrian populist escapist fantasy for viewers that haven’t yet come to terms with their own internalized conservatism. I’ll have forgotten it entirely by the time I publish this review.