David Ayer’s movies have often straddled the line between edgelord wannabe grit and cartoonish macho fantasy — although his best films, like WWII tank adventure Fury or Schwarzenegger trashsterpiece Sabotage, tend to lean more in one direction than another. The director’s last couple projects have moved toward embracing more generic lone wolf vigilante fantasies. The Beekeeper, released earlier in 2025, and this most recent film, A Working Man, both feature Jason Statham as a former military badass who gets roped back into using his special set of skills — that’s the generic part. But both movies also take place within a cartoonish, pulpy, almost comic-book style surreality instead of hewing nearer Ayer’s typical attempts at verisimilitude.
Here, Statham is Levon Cade, a man who suffers from PTSD and brain damage as a result of his military service, and who’s attempting to scrape his life back together and regain custody of his young daughter — in other words, the usual stuff. When his boss’ daughter is abducted by Russian sex traffickers, he decides that he’ll stop at nothing to safely recover the girl and slaughter every single baddie who gets in his way. Most of the resultant movie is an almost agonizingly dull Taken knockoff, with a boringly invulnerable Statham threatening various bad guys who smugly taunt him before he violently ends their worthless lives. There are a few brief highlights to be found, particularly involving a pair of paisley jumpsuit-clad dipshit brothers whose deaths you truly can’t wait for. But there’s also an extended digression that follows from Cade tracking down a bizarre gang of meth-dealing bikers, a side plot that pads A Working Man out to an obscene two hours.
Even worse than the bloat is that there are precious few flashes of Ayer’s provocations to be found — so appreciate them where you can. And although it’s absurdly stated that a rich teen girl’s sudden disappearance during a celebratory night out with friends would be summarily dismissed by any investigative body, that idea sneakily bumps up against a general mistrust of law enforcement in the director’s hands. So yes, this may be the thousandth completely made-up Fox News Scare-drama version of what actual sex trafficking looks like, but at least it comes replete with a few shakes of ACAB subtext.
And speaking of qualified recommendations for the film, if you can make it through the slog that constitutes most of this feature, the final 20 minutes or so at least manage to deliver a very amusingly bonkers display of violence, with Statham interrupting an Eyes Wide Shut-esque debauchery party for rich assholes, leading to a conflagration of corrupt cops, Russian gangsters, and outlaw bikers in samurai and viking armor, all garishly lit in purple and blue, like some sort of mashup of Streets of Fire and Fury Road. The fight choreography is crisp and cleanly edited for maximum crunchy effect by Fred Raskin, and the whole thing is punctuated by Statham’s simultaneously robotic and wry affect, delivering his goofy one-liners with something closer to duty than actual relish. Mileages will vary as to whether the journey was worth the destination, but there’s certainly a place for Ayer’s idiosyncrasy in this rather bland framework.
DIRECTOR: David Ayer; CAST: Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Merab Ninidze, Maximilian Osinski; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: March 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.
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