A Working Man Parent Guide

The director of Taken called, he wants his movie back.

Do you miss 80’s action movies, where the explosions came first and the dialogue came second? Do you enjoy watching muscle bound men punch each other? Do you think the laws of physics shouldn’t get in the way of a good gun fight? Do you think Michael Bay movies are too high and mighty with their “plots”? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then boy howdy! Do I have a movie for you!

In A Working Man, Jason Statham plays Levon Cade, a veteran whose mysterious past comes to light when he sets out to rescue his boss’s daughter. Our hero Levon previously spent two decades in the UK Special Forces but after his wife’s suicide, he left the military to work for Joe Garcia (played by Michael Pena) as a construction worker, soon becoming a valued friend of the Garcia family.

Levon currently lives at the construction site, bunking in his brand new, perfectly clean, leather interior Ford F-150 to save money for lawyers so he can fight his evil, yoga-loving father-in-law for custody of his daughter. Levon is clearly battling some demons (there are allusions to PTSD) but this movie really weaponizes Levon’s mental health because he must use his training to save Joe’s daughter when she is kidnapped and human trafficked by Russian gangsters.

Jenny Garcia (Arianna Rivas) has known Levon since she was a little girl when Levon started working for her father – and promised her that he would always have her back. That promise is put to the test when Jenny goes out bar hopping with some friends and is kidnapped in the most complicated human trafficking scheme ever concocted. She is then “bought” by wealthy gangsters for an evening to be used in whatever way they see fit. Determined to save Jenny, Levon proceeds to cut a bloody, violent swathe through the criminal underworld as he does whatever he needs to do to find her.

Levon’s adventures take him from low-level drug dealers, to the Russian mob, and then to meth dealing bikers. Along the way, we meet some of Levon’s former military buddies who only exist to provide exposition for what apparently passes for a “plot” these days. Levon brutally shoots, stabs, kicks, breaks, punches, and otherwise assaults his way through each bad guy to finally rescue Jenny. He saves her (don’t worry, that spoils nothing about this movie). The real issue here is the writing, which is simply insulting to viewers with functioning brain cells. The exposition is so heavy handed and unnecessary. If we cut out all the “I’ll pull out my gun that I use to shoot people” and “oh no, Vanko and Danya, who are my sons, are now dead lying here on these tables” we would only have a 35-minute movie.

This is an action movie to the core. We have a battered hero who looks like an underdog but is really Jason Statham. To be completely honest, my opinion is that the action scenes are super fun to watch… so long as you are willing to suspend belief in the laws of physics. Then again, if I can accept that Orcs run around Middle Earth for nine hours, I can accept that gun shots send people flying through walls, but I digress. All in all, A Working Man is surprisingly entertaining for adult genre fans. It is brutally violent without being overly gory, compared to other gritty violent action movies like Nobody or John Wick. As much as I enjoyed the action, it was hardly worth sitting through the absolutely inane story telling. And the real lesson is that family is the most important thing (no really, that’s the entire ending).