In 2024, Director/producer David Ayer and Jason Statham teamed up for the high octane action thriller, The Beekeeper. The film consisted of Jason Statham dispensing justice for 90 minutes and was a box office success that received high praise from critics and moviegoers.  

Ayer and Statham have teamed up again for another action thriller, A Working Man.  

The plot for A Working Man is a simple elevator pitch for any Jason Statham movie – an everyday man uses skills from his past to save someone. Levon (Jason Statham) is a construction worker in Chicago. In the first 10 minutes, trouble shows up on the job site and we quickly learn this seemingly every day working man is an ex-Royal Marine. He works for a family run construction company and when their daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped, Levon uses his deadly skills to bring her back home…and kill anyone that gets in his way.  

After the film sets up how badass Levon is in the first 15 minutes, the rest of the runtime is Levon systematically killing his way through an organization chart of Russian bad guys. That’s the movie. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than that. There is a subplot about his daughter and wife that passed and an ongoing custody battle but that’s just something to give Levon motivation that the character doesn’t particularly need.  

Like most of these revenge films, everyone he encounters is a different level of evil douchebag with specific cartoonishly evil characteristics. It’s like a video game and we’re watching Levon have different boss battles until the final showdown. Like a video game, all of this seems familiar, there aren’t any surprises, and it can be a fun time if you turn your brain off and enjoy what’s on screen.

A Working Man is exactly what you think it is. If you’ve seen the trailer, it shows you all you need to know. There are a few laughs and funny one-liners, but it’s simply Jason Statham on a warpath killing people in the most insane ways. Every now and then he’ll deliver a quipy one-liner but don’t’ worry, he’ll get back to killing people very shortly. The Beekeeper was a much cleaner and tighter story, but if you enjoy that type of action thriller, A Working Man might work for you.  

Grade: B-