Review: A Working Man (2025)

Jason Statham is back, scowling and shooting his way through a mountain of bad guys that only exist to be immediately turned into corpses. In A Working Man, Statham (now in his late 50s) is a former British soldier: highly trained and very lethal. He's a widower with a young daughter, living in the USA where he works as the foreman for a construction company run by Michael Peña and his family, all of whom treat Statham like one of their own. But he's also a man filled with rage. We learn early in the film that his wife committed suicide, and this has left him consumed with anger. When the daughter of his boss is kidnapped while clubbing, Statham vows to bring her back. In order to do this, he has to utilize his very special set of skills, laying waste to human traffickers and mobsters alike. 

Sound familiar? That's because A Working Man is a series of cliches and tropes from many other, better, action movies. We've got the obligatory human traffickers as bad guys, but we've also got Russian mobsters, because Russians are always the bad guys--at least in the movies. We've got an ex-military hot shot who's now dealing drugs out of the back of a motorcycle bar and who literally sits on a throne made of exhaust pipes and says things like "lock and load" unironically. We've got the war veteran (David Harbour, who seems to have only filmed for a single day) who lost his sight in battle but is now some sort of firearms sensei, dispensing wisdom and machine guns alike. We've even got opening credits graphics that depict the American flag and bullets, which makes no sense considering both Statham and his character are British.

Shortly after the kidnapping that kicks off the story, David Harbour tells Statham that if he's going to go after this kidnapped girl, he's got to go all the way. It's an ominous foreshadowing that death is about to follow, but we have to wait another 90 minutes to see Statham truly go all the way. Oh, there are moments of action, such as when he takes on an entire bar-full of brawlers who are all twice his size, which he, of course, bests effortlessly. But there's quite a bit of talking, squinting, and grimacing, dragging out a movie that really only has enough story for act one and act three. A Working Man is a long two hours, and much of it feels like a slog without momentum. Statham has the charisma of a baked potato, and there's no real reason to care about any of this. 

Furthermore, Statham is often an anti-hero in his movies, but I'm having a hard time seeing him as anything other than a bad guy here. In act one, he almost punches his father in law (granted, the guy had it coming). In another scene, he defends his construction site with a shotgun. The movie goes out of its way to show him as a soldier who never left the war behind and now sees every day as a battle, driving the streets in various Dodge trucks and sports cars and looking for a righteous cause to exercise his tendency toward violence. He feels less like a hero and more like a rageaholic that's waiting for you to cut him off in traffic so that he can run you down and put you in the hospital. I don't like his character, I don't understand him, and I definitely don't respect him. Unlike Liam Neeson in Taken, this isn't personal. This is not his daughter (sidebar: Statham doesn't see his actual daughter very often, and she feels like she was written into the screenplay in a later draft). No, Statham's character just runs through brick walls. He's a blunt instrument who makes John Rambo look like Albert Einstein. In another movie, the script would explore the damage that his service in the military has done to his psyche: PTSD, programming him to be a killer, and why the loss of his wife has filled him with anger. A Working Man is not interested in exploring any of this. Statham's character feels no different near the end of the film than he did at the beginning. 

I expect more from producer and co-screenwriter Sylvester Stallone, the man who has often used his action movies, and especially the character of John Rambo, to say something about the human condition. Plus, the last Rambo movie, also co-written by Stallone, has already mined the kidnapped daughter angle, and it didn't feel fresh then. Frankly, I expect better from everyone involved.  David Ayer, a veteran and the filmmaker behind The Tax Collector, The Beekeeper, and the first Suicide Squad movie, excels at staging brutally-violent massacres, but doesn't seem interested in telling stories that make us care about characters in them. 

A Working Man  feels like paint-by-numbers action movie filmmaking, but the best action movies rely on creative set pieces, memorable and over-the-top melees, and a ballet of bullets. A Working Man delivers none of this. It's dull and lifeless, filled with things every action fan has seen countless times before.