Yes, this is a review of A Working Man starring Jason Statham and directed by David Ayer, the team behind the excellent The Beekeeper from last year. We’ll get to the full review, but first, it’s storytime.

My house burned down in the Eaton Fire in January 2025. It was one of the worst days/weeks of my life, and the continued period after the fire was a hellscape of wondering where I was going to live, where my life would go from here, and other horrible thoughts no one should ever have to go through. So what does this have to do with A Working Man, you ask? Well, in that time of a deep darkness for many out there, there was one thing that brought a glimmer of hope to this writer. What was that? It was the trailer for A Working Man. Yes, that sounds absolutely insane, but it’s true. I stopped what I was doing and saw it on my phone. I’m not afraid to admit that tears of joy rolled down my cheeks.

So when the time came to actually see the full finished product for A Working Man, I was ecstatic. Would it be as good as that trailer? Would it capture the same feelings of joy and hope that were brought in that dark time?

Watch the trailer for yourself below.

That trailer felt like a movie that was perfectly designed to bring some sort of comfort and hope in a dark time. I honestly didn’t believe it was a real movie because of just how perfect it seemed. You have Jason Statham, one of the best action stars of all time. You add in David Ayer and his visionary action directing. Bring that with the storyline, which continues the Jason Statham Has A Job Cinematic Universe. I’m pretty sure Jason Statham savaging scumbags is something that has a near 100% approval rating across the board, besides of course, with scumbags. Those scumbags this time around are human traffickers that take his boss and friend’s (Michael Pena) daughter, Jenny (Arianna Rivas). A former special forces soldier, Levon Cade (Statham) takes matters into his own hands when the police have no leads.

Movies like this are special to me. They encapsulate why I love movies, because it’s just a pure joy-filled action movie that knows exactly what it is. It is part of the deep recesses of our primitive brain that seeing Jason Statham take on the scum of the Earth brings us joy. So that’s what A Working Man does.

Do we know that Jason Statham is going to come up on top at the end of the movie and triumph over evil? Yes we do. That’s not a spoiler for A Working Man. It’s part of the comfort of watching something like this. It lets you know that through all of the horrible things these monsters are doing, that good and decent people, who happen to kick a lot of ass, will triumph.

Throughout a nearly 2-hour runtime, A Working Man doesn’t play out like your traditional one-man army action movie. If The Beekeeper was like Commando, A Working Man is more like a Death Wish movie. Hell, even Statham’s character doesn’t immediately take up the job to find Jenny. He has to go see his friend from the war, Gunny (played by David Harbour) to convince himself that it’s something he has to do.

The plot takes Statham from simply going after the human traffickers that kidnapped Jenny to taking on an entire wing of the Russian mob that is connected to it. This section of the film takes a bit of the action off, but Ayer sprinkles in some frenetic pieces, including a thriller of a fight scene where a drug kingpin, Dutch (Chidi Ajufo), makes Cade show off his skills. And yes, it’s here where we get a legendary title drop of a line with:

“You’re a working man.”

The B-plot of the whole thing is that Cade is a widower, whose daughter lives most of her time with her grandfather, who hates Cade for his daughter’s death. That’s really the only part of A Working Man that didn’t well, work, for me. His relationship with his daughter is cute and all, but it doesn’t ever really get resolved. The grandfather is threatening to take custody away, and he has a bunch of money and lawyers. Cade does something that might help the relationship with him, but the whole thing isn’t really resolved. It feels like something is missing from the plot with this, but it’s the only thing I had an issue with.

The various henchmen range from detestable to kind of funny in the case of the two Russian mobster twins who have eccentric outfits. The two human traffickers at the center of the story are both inept in a cartoonish way. They’re morons that get high all the time and it’s one of the most satisfying scenes in the film to see them get what’s coming to them. Everything builds up to a massive set piece at the mob flophouse, including a shootout with a modified M14, a biker gang showing up, and Statham handing out justice like it’s his job. It is left a bit open-ended in case we do want A Working Man 2, so there’s that to look forward to.

With a premise like this one, A Working Man really shouldn’t work. It’s silly. It is. A construction worker is a former special forces counter-terrorism operative with a friend who lives off the grid with a bunch of guns, and gets involved with the Russian mob after trying to rescue his boss’s daughter from human traffickers; it should not work. But it does.

A Working Man proves that movies can still be an experience that takes you out of the hell of daily life, even for just under two hours. The magic of Jason Statham laying waste to human traffickers, wifebeaters, drug dealers, and whoever gets in his way is a cathartic experience. You might not get the same almost out-of-body experience I had while watching the trailer and eventually the full movie for A Working Man, but even if you don’t, it’s a fantastic one-man wrecking crew action movie that feels like Staham is entering his Charles Bronson era of his career.

You know exactly what you’re walking into the theater for with A Working Man and the movie delivers that and then some with earnest asskicking from its star.

A Working Man releases in theaters on March 28th, 2025.

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