Levon Cade left his profession behind to work construction and be a good dad to his daughter. But when a local girl vanishes, he’s asked to return to the skills that made him a mythic figure in the shadowy world of counter-terrorism.
Chuck says:
In 2012, David Ayer released “End of Watch,” one of the great police procedurals of the last twenty years. Focused on the toll patrolling our dangerous streets has on the men and women who wear the badge, the film was far better than standard action fare and served as a calling card for the writer/director. Unfortunately, this was the zenith of Ayer’s career, as his subsequent work consisted of standard action fare (“Sabotage,” “Fury”), a misguided superhero epic (“Suicide Squad”), and the occasional music video.
His most recent effort, the Jason Statham actioner “A Working Man” shows how far Ayer has fallen. Lacking in imagination, sloppily made, at times nonsensical and offensively violent, this is the sort of film in which everyone isn’t just going through the motions, but blatantly show they just don’t care about what they’re working on. No thought is required of the audience as none was employed in the making of this vile motion picture, the product of overgrown adolescents with a disturbing notion of how to solve problems.
The story, such as it is, is told in the broadest strokes, wasting no time on character development as Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, who adapted Chuck Dixon’s novel, are fully aware they are using archetypes and a hackneyed premise. I know this will likely come as a shock but Statham’s character, Levon Cade, is a man with a violent past. Ex-military, he simply wants to live a quiet life, fighting to get custody of his daughter from his bitter father-in-law.
Wouldn’t you know it, Jenny (Arianna Rivas), the daughter of the kindly couple he works for gets kidnapped by a duo who work for a white slavery network. While he’s reluctant to put down his hammer and pick up an AK-47, circumstances force his hand and Cade wreaks havoc on the mean streets of Chicago, looking for Jenny.
The story is simplicity itself, yet Ayer and Stallone purposely sidetrack Cade so he can blow stuff up real good and snap necks with impunity. It doesn’t take him long to figure out who’s behind the abduction, yet our anti-hero inexplicably begins a cat-and-mouse game in which he embarks on buying drugs from the bad guys and dumping them. I’m clueless as to why this occurs, as these acts do nothing to help him save the girl.
But I’m thinking about this far more than Ayer and company as all they are concerned with is staging one heinously violent act after another. If your idea of a good time is seeing people cut in half by machine gun fire, others cut navel to chinbone with a bowie knife or witnessing a woman throttled to death, then this is your fetid cup of tea.
Pithy lines of dialogue like, “I can see you guys coming a mile away,” “It’s not who I am anymore,” and “You’ve killed your way into this, you’ll have to kill your way out,” are par for the course. The script is a collection of cliches and leftovers, while the production design is also slipshod. The presence of an abnormally large full moon in nearly every night scene, all obviously shot on a sloppily dressed soundstage, sums up the lazy way the film was made, making its title even more ironic.
No one worked on “Man.” All involved clocked in, clocked out and collected a check. It’s a callous, offensive exercise that prompted me to take the hottest shower I could afterwards. That this would be accepted as “entertainment” by millions left me more depressed than I have been in quite some time.
Zero Stars
