Review: A Working Man

There’s a moment in A Working Man—David Ayer’s latest exercise in greasy-knuckled Americana—where Jason Statham’s Levon Cade lobs a metal pail full of nails into a thug’s face with the kind of weary precision that suggests he’s done it before. Not just in this movie, or this life, but in every alternate timeline where construction workers moonlight as god-tier killing machines. It’s absurd, obviously. But absurdity, when applied at the correct velocity, becomes conviction. And conviction is something A Working Man has in spades. There is a glorious moment where Statham menacingly pours too much syrup on someone's pancakes. That is either your thing or it isn't. Spoiler alert: it's my thing.

Following hot on the heels of The Beekeeper, Ayer’s previous Statham-led bruiser (in which the man went full apiarist assassin), A Working Man plays like a grungier, sadder cousin to that gleefully unhinged pulp. If The Beekeeper was Ayer channeling the spirit of a sugar-high Zack Snyder, this one is more Stallone in a cold sweat at 3AM, mumbling about honor and bad men over a typewriter. Which makes sense, given that Sly co-wrote the screenplay and originally envisioned the Chuck Dixon source material (Levon’s Trade) as a prestige TV vehicle. Somewhere in the background, you can still hear the ghost of that limited series pitch trying to claw its way out.

Levon Cade is a former black-ops soldier turned steel-beam whisperer in suburban Illinois, where the sky always looks five minutes away from a thunderstorm and the moon looms like an omen. He’s trying to stay clean. He’s trying to keep custody of his daughter. He’s trying to sleep in his truck without freezing to death. But when his boss’ daughter Jenny (Arrianna Rivas, armed with a spine of tungsten) is snatched by a glammy pair of Team Rocket-coded traffickers, Cade does what any reformed killer would do: he says he’s not that guy anymore, then proceeds to waterboard a man in a Motel 6 bathtub.

What unfolds is less a plot than a gauntlet. Cade smashes through the Russian mob like a pneumatic battering ram, each fight a clumsy ballet of drywall carnage and improvised brutality. Most of the action is less John Wick and more Home Depot Apocalypse, with Statham turning found objects—nail guns, rebar, a misused waffle iron—into instruments of righteous fury. One showdown in the back of a moving van, hands bound, recalls Jackie Chan by way of a Monster Energy ad. It's completely ridiculous, but that’s the point. Shout out to the costume designer for having a field day making sure each baddie has a signature look.

And yet, between the killsprees and gravel-voiced grunts, there’s a strange softness lurking beneath Statham’s usual tungsten-plated performance. A moment where he watches his daughter sleep. A quiet beat with David Harbour’s blind ex-military buddy “Gunny” (Harbour, doing solid weapon-sommelier deadpan). Even Jenny gets to kick her own share of ass. These aren’t just grace notes—they’re strategy. Ayer lets the violence land harder by occasionally pulling his punches.

Still, the film wears its seams like a badge. The lighting’s muddy, the pacing bloats around hour two, and half the villains seem to have wandered in from a defunct Cirque du Soleil troupe. But when the final act detonates beneath that comically massive moon, and Statham mutters “I can pay my own bills” like a man daring the cosmos to test him, it all coheres into something more than the sum of its meatheaded parts.

A Working Man might not be great cinema, but in the realm of A-List fever dreams, it’s damn near essential.

3/5