A Working Man

{A Working Man} is the second collaboration between Jason Statham and David Ayer in one year. The director of the infamous {Suicide Squad} and {Bright} as well as genuinely good movies like {End of Watch} or {Fury}, has now settled with B-movie action films with recycled scripts filled with clichés, low stakes, low budgets, low expectations and, well, low everything. {A Working Man} is the kind of movie you can put on when you want to switch off your brain for two hours, with a lot of guaranteed punching, shooting, and killing in a familiar package that won't make you think too much. A guilty-pleasure type of movie is always welcomed, but this one is even below average and you will need to really lower your expectations to squeeze something good out of it.

I was more than willing to embrace and enjoy the type of movie I've described, but while {A Working Man} checks all of those boxes, including a lead like Jason Statham who always fulfils his part of the deal, the quality on the rest of elements of the movie is sub par. You probably wouldn't expect that much imagination was used to make a movie like this, but {A Working Man} absolutely never tries to add something remotely fresh or original to the formula. I wished there was at least a hint of a plot twist in the middle to spice things up a little, something they could claim as their own idea so that somebody in five years remembers that this movie existed. But nah, there's nothing.

Everything has been done before and better: an ex-military personnel with PTSD who works on a construction site, who reluctantly says things like "that's not who I am anymore" before immediately snapping back into action to rescue a kidnapped teenager, effortlessly killing every bad guy without breaking a sweat - bad guys who, of course, mutter the classic "what are you", a question nobody has ever said out loud before.

The bad guys here are a Russian mob clan (what a surprise), which already means this film is less original than Ayer and Statham's previous film, {The Beekeeper}, which had a phishing group as the bad guys. Here, there seems to be an endless lineage of Russian mobsters who step in right after Statham has killed the previous. More meat to the grinder, I guess, but none of the action scenes offer anything exciting. As it usually happens with these types of pro action heroes who do everything right and are unmatched, there's no tension, and the entertainment comes from seeing how creative the kills can get. For the final climax, things do get wilder, but you may already be too tired by then. And it is a great disappointment that David Harbour is in the movie to do absolutely nothing.

I wished I could have enjoyed {A Working Man} as the silly, mindless entertainment action fans love, but everything here is simply too mediocre, too unoriginal, uninspired, and devoid of any fun or humour. It takes itself completely serious, as perhaps it should while dealing with human trafficking, but does not care about throwing an endless stream of clichés, mixed with boring actions scenes, that make it all fall flat.