A WORKING MAN: A Spiritual Remake?

A WORKING MAN (Blu-ray)

2025 / 116 min

Warner Bros

#InPartnershipwithWB

Review by Mr. Bonnie, the Bonesnapper😼

A Working Man is Jason Statham and director David Ayer’s second collaboration following last year’s The Beekeeper, a sleeper hit that was also surprisingly good. It didn’t reinvent the wheel of anything, but was a hell of a lot of fun, unleashing Statham to do what he does best, which is kill a lot of people.

One can’t help but compare the two. Though based on a 2014 novel, A Working Man is so structurally similar to The Beekeeper that it could almost be considered a spiritual sequel…or more accurately, a spiritual remake. This time, Statham plays Levon Cade, a former super soldier who’s now a construction foreman for Joe Garcia (Michael Pena), who treats him like family. When Joe’s teenage daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped by human traffickers, Cade is compelled to find and bring her home.

His investigation results in numerous clashes with Russian mobsters, Cade killing his way up the food chain. Like The Beekeeper, the various bad guys are over-the-top caricatures that become increasingly flamboyant as the film goes along. It ain't long before some of these guys look like Batman villains or Mad Max extras. And since Statham plays yet-another one man wrecking crew, the outcome of each and every conflict is never in doubt. 

Someone's about to get Stathamed.

Still, it’s fun watching Statham do his thing, even if the sometimes meandering story isn’t quite as engaging, further bogged down by a superfluous subplot involving Cade’s daughter and his asshole ex-father-in-law (who wants custody of her). Elsewhere, David Harbour, Michael Pena and Jason Flemyng are good but underused in thankless, surprisingly small roles. Others (like Eve Mauro as psycho kidnapper Artemis) overact like trash talking WWE wrestlers.

But ultimately, A Working Man is all about Jason Statham doing Jason Statham stuff. Most of the film is built around his brutal brand of bloodletting, and as such, it delivers lots of meat & potatoes action. However, because The Beekeeper was such a pleasant surprise, I had slightly higher expectations from the reteaming of Statham and Ayer. Then again, how often do remakes ever equal the original?