A WORKING MAN (2025)

A WORKING MAN (2025)

Tagline: Human traffickers beware.

(Action, Thriller, I Mean Errbody) [R]

You wish I was a cop...

In this one, Levon Cade is just minding his own business when the daughter of the construction business family he works for goes missing. Having a daughter of his own Cade can't help but return to his former life as an elite military soldier and counter-terrorism expert to find Jenny Garcia. A working man is on the clock, and a lot of heads are going to roll. 

First off, this thing is a lot like RAMBO: LAST BLOOD, only with more 90s-style wisecracking. This totally makes sense when you find out Sylvester Stallone was involved in writing and producing it. I know pretty much every review out there is trying to compare this to THE BEEKEEPER, which is a better movie, but I think the main difference is that in THE BEEKEEPER, the victim is pretty much defenseless and isn't in much of the movie. In this movie, the victim is far from defenseless, and her captors are wildly incompetent, which somewhat takes the levity of the situation down a notch. I am all about training your daughter's self-defense, but I think when you are trying to draw the audience into caring about a character, adding a level of vulnerability is where it's at. I really don't like movies where the hero seems like they might not have even been needed if the victim had made 1 or 2 different choices when picking their escape plan. I am not saying I didn't like Jenny and Arianna Rivas (PROM DATES), does crush the role, but I think they made it more of a challenge to feel like she even needed rescuing than was needed. 

58-year-old Jason Statham hasn't missed a step and does a great job as Levon Cade, but this isn't anything we haven't seen from him. He's basically been playing the same character with different skills and different names for the past 7 or 8 years (maybe longer). Jason Flemyng is a brilliant actor whose talents were sadly wasted here. He is on screen for maybe 5 minutes, but this thing would have been served better if he had been cast as the main villain. Michael Peña is so so as Joe Garcia, I think I like him better in comedic roles. Then we have David Harbour, who plays a friend of Cade's who is blind. He does a pretty solid job here, and without the credits, I wouldn't have even known it was him. 

We get some good pacing, but the world feels too small and too big at the same time. Several scenes are shot at the same bar, and then others feel like they could have almost been in a different country, but they don't make that clear. Probably the most over-the-top stuff in this flick, though, is that we never see Cade injured severely. I am kind of thinking along the lines of THE EQUALIZER films. At least he gets shot and knifed and all that. None of these movies are that realistic; they aren't meant to be, but the good guy should get at least some injuries besides just getting scratched on the face. 

Having said all that, I like Jason Statham as an actor and rarely miss his flicks. A WORKING MAN is a solid film in a sea of "not-so-solid" films. It does feel like there could be a part 2 here, like JOHN WICK style, but these one-off films that Jason has been doing lately have been very entertaining (even with this one having a pretty dark subject matter). I have read some reviews saying this movie had no plot, but it does. This movie wasn't designed to babysit you through the inner workings of the sex-trafficking hierarchy and how to find the leaders involved, so you can fill them full of lead. The villains are given motivation to react as they react; it's not all that difficult to sort out. 

This one gets a 4 out of 7. It's pretty good, but the rewatchability is low, unlike THE BEEKEEPER. 

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