'A Working Man' is a Strange Cocktail of Competing Kinds of Stupid
David Ayer doing a comic booky Jason Statham movie is like putting Papa Roach in the Eurovision song contest.
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I made this meme when I first heard about A Working Man.
I stand by the meme. It’s a good meme. How could you not get excited about three of the biggest names in the Dumb Guy Canon working together? What I hadn’t counted on is basically the same issue that bedevils all failed superteams and supergroups — that not all great flavors go great together. David Ayer and this project are like walnuts and bubblegum.
The two main strains of Dumb Guy brilliance competing here are the high camp of 2010-era graphic novel adaptations and David Ayer’s performatively gritty nü metal white cholo aesthetic. Do we want the Jason Statham who wears flannels and Carhartt and works in construction, or the Jason Statham who beats up ambiguously Slavic bad guys while wearing tailored suits and driving flash sazz wagons? A Working Man seems to want both, and while the extreme contradictions in these desires are occasionally transcendant, most of the time they’re working at cross purposes.
A Working Man was originally developed by Sylvester Stallone’s production company as a television series based on Levon’s Trade, a novel by Chuck Dixon, most famous for his work on Punisher in the 90s and early 2000s. While the novel itself is so obscure that a used paperback is currently selling for $250 on Amazon, you can see why Stallone wanted it based on the jacket copy alone:
Levon Cade left his profession behind to work construction. He just wants to live an anonymous life and be a good dad to his daughter. But when a local girl vanishes he’s asked to return to the skills that made him a mythic figure in the shadowy world of counter-terrorism. His hunt for the missing college student takes him to the heart of a vicious criminal conspiracy. Levon’s actions create a chain reaction that threatens all he holds dear. It’s time for him to return to his trade. And Levon’s trade is death.
You can practically see Jason Statham’s disembodied scowl hovering above the text when you read “and Levon’s trade is death.”
The Beekeeper, The Construction Worker, The Crossing Guard — I could watch an entire series in which Statham plays different Village People while gruesomely bashing bad guys to death. Give him all the stupid hats and let him cook.
But that’s simple, and A Working Man is hopelessly complex. The “vicious criminal conspiracy” in question turns out to be a very goofy one, involving the Russian Brotherhood, a mafia failson named Dimi, and a meth ring run out of a biker bar where grizzled guys in Hagar the Horrible helmets drink big beers and listen to, I shit you not, “Wagon Wheel.” I know that when I get geeked out on a meth and prepare to shovel fight a rival drug crew, I like to set the mood with some pontoon boat music.
David Ayer, who made his name on white cholo classics like Training Day (the screenplay), The Fast and the Furious (also screenplay), and End of Watch (writer and director), feels like he got way over his skis on this one. Ayer (also of the 2016 Suicide Squad) is great at disturbing and kind of gross. “Goofy” is a weird fit. Like a lot of Dumb Guy Screenwriting Savants™ (Stallone, Sheridan, Sutter, et. al) Ayer’s work tends to be fascinating when he’s taking it deadly seriously. In A Working Man he keeps trying to be funny and break the fourth wall, and it ends up being like Papa Roach entered the Eurovision song contest. It’s like trying to enjoy a big greasy hamburger and someone keeps dumping Skittles on it.
Statham plays Levon — which I had assumed was pronounced “luh-VONN” but apparently rhymes with “Kevin” — a former Royal Marine now working as a foreman for the Garcia and Family construction company. Levon sleeps in his Ford F-150 and his grateful workers are always gifting him tupperwares full of Mexican food so he doesn’t starve. Mmm, chicken tinga! It’d be a nice life, if not for his father-in-law, a rich, lib-coded doctor using his considerable wealth to try to take full custody of Levon’s daughter. Levon’s wife committed suicide while he was out on deployment and her father still blames Levon for it. That old story.
One day at the construction site, some cartel members start roughing up one of Levon’s workers. The Stath intervenes, giving them a right bashing, using a hard hat and a bucket of nails — filmed, sadly like all of A Working Man’s action sequences, as a series of quick-cut blurry closeups set to thump sounds. If you assumed that this cartel plot line would lead anywhere, you would be wrong, since presumably A Working Man’s production team realized that they already made that movie, and it was called Rambo: Last Blood.
Instead, a completely different gang of bad guys kidnaps Jenny Garcia (Arianna Rivas), the 19-year-old college student/piano prodigy daughter of Garcia Construction’s head man, Joe, played by Michael Peña. “She gave up a piano scholarship to go to business school so she could be like me!” Peña says tearfully in his lone, unconvincing scene.
And so now it’s time for Levon to return to his trade. “You hunt people,” Papa Garcia says, which is a little strange given that all we ever learn about Levon’s former life is that he was a Royal Marine. “My father was a Green Beret,” Garcia says, “I can spot them from a mile away,” implying in a vague way that Levon also did some kind of spookish counter-terrorism work. It comes across less “a particular set of skills” than “the troops are magic.”
It turns out that Jenny has been kidnapped by a complex network of boogie men from cable news. She’s spotted by a hipster bartender at her birthday party (which sees the college girls dancing first to heavy metal, then to house music, and finally to Irish folk), who then tips off a boyfriend/girlfriend team of Hot Topic goths with face tattoos. The face tat couple (we later find out the girl’s name is “Artemis”) kidnaps Jenny to sell her to an evil fat ponytail pervert, all apparently cooked up by a fail son of the Russian Brotherhood named Dimi (Maximilian Osinski). Most of this feels like interstitial scenes in a first-person shooter videogame.
Levon follows the “clues” (more vibes, really, this script is far too stupid for cause and effect), which leads him first to the house of Dimi’s uncle, an oligarch type with two henchman wearing matching silk track suits with bucket hats in different colors. He drowns the oligarch in a pool (one of the better sequences on account of you can actually see what’s happening), then steals a bunch of their money to go buy “blue ice” from the biker bar who were providing the hipster bartender’s drugs.
Why Levon runs this whole undercover drug sting scheme when he already knows who has Jenny, I truly have no idea. But the biker bar (the one playing “Wagon Wheel”) is run by another of A Working Man’s insane heavies: Dutch (Chidi Ajufo), an ex-military biker who bonds with Levon over both being troops. One of David Ayer’s odd quirks is that he loves the troops so much that he inevitably makes half of his characters troops, even the ones who have to fight each other. So he ends up trying to squeeze troop bonding into even fights to the death. We saw this in The Beekeeper, during which Jason Statham had to kill a bunch of cool commandos even while respecting them. This leads, in A Working Man, to a scene during which Statham dispatches Dutch with a survival knife to the heart in a way that I can only describe as oddly tender. “Moy foight wasn’t wiv you,” Levon laments.
Dutch basically thanks Levon for the privilege, and Levon compassionately closes Dutch’s eyes after death. Sleep tactically, king.