- Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, David Harbour, Michael Pena
- March 28th 2025
- 116
- David Ayer
Jason Statham plays a construction worker who dusts off his special set of skills when his boss’s daughter is kidnapped.
Jason Statham may be approaching 60, but he is showing no signs of leaving the action genre any time soon.
The British hard man, best known for action movies like Transporter, Fast & Furious and The Expendables, has reunited with his The Beekeeper director David Ayer for his latest movie A Working Man.
The film, written by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, stars Statham as Levon Cade, an ex-Royal Marines commando who has a new life as a construction worker and a father to a young girl.
However, he reluctantly dusts off his special set of skills when his boss’s teenage daughter, Jenny (Arianna Rivas), is kidnapped.
His mission to rescue Jenny leads him to an underground network of Russian drug dealers and human traffickers.
The plot might ring a bell – and that’s because it’s basically a redo of 2008’s Taken, starring Liam Neeson! There are some different circumstances and Statham isn’t tracking down his own daughter, but he’s still a man with “a very particular set of skills” saving a girl from traffickers.
You wouldn’t mind the similarity so much if A Working Man was as good as Taken, but unfortunately, it doesn’t come close.
There’s plenty of action here, but the majority of the sequences feel rather dull. There are some cool moments with nasty bodily injuries and inventive weapons, but the action is nowhere near as gripping and exciting as it should be in a film like this.
However, Statham is a capable action star, as he has proven time and time again.
It’s always entertaining seeing him taking on bad guys, even if there are far too many, making the film much longer than it should be (it’s almost 2 hours).
The story is also tonally confused. It seems like a serious actioner, yet there are quite a lot of funny lines and moments. Was this on purpose? Are viewers laughing at the film or with it?
It’s hard to discern if the light-hearted touches were intentional, but there’s no way we’re supposed to take two Russian henchmen in matching tracksuits and Jason Flemying as a Russian gangster seriously.
While it may not reach the heights of Taken or even Statham’s strongest action films, there are some moments to enjoy in A Working Man.
In cinemas from Friday 28th March.
By Hannah Wales.
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