The writer-director David Ayer began his career concocting scripts for action thrillers that put some psychological nuance into their boom-boom pyrotechnics. Yes, Denzel Washington’s chest-beating boasts in “Training Day” (2001) made theaters quake even if they weren’t equipped with Dolby, but there were further dimensions to his character.
It seems as if he threw all that sort of thing out of his tool kit around the time of “Suicide Squad” (2016). Ayer’s pictures are purely blunt-force objects now, and effective ones. And all the more persuasive when Jason Statham stars in them.
In “A Working Man,” whose script was coauthored by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, Statham plays a construction worker with a violent past from which he’s trying to distance himself. (Fat chance in this kind of movie.) When the daughter of his boss is kidnapped, he’s is compelled to go to labyrinthine and brutal lengths to get her back.
This movie follows up on Statham and Ayer’s 2024 “The Beekeeper,” a similar payback punishment picture whose forced premise wasn’t helped by its garishly dressed villains. The villains here are garishly dressed too, but there’s a rationale: They’re Russian. In any event, Statham racks up bad-guy kills like he’s collecting Pokémon.
As the kidnapped daughter, Jenny, Arianna Rivas takes fruitful advantage of her character’s efforts to fight back, showing acrobatic action chops. The star’s old “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” mate Jason Flemyng plays a slimy oligarch, and David Harbour is Statham’s wise pal (and armorer); it’s a satisfying cast all the way down. In a peculiar touch, near the end of the movie, its slimiest villain, played by Kenneth Collard, puts on a costume that makes him look like the Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins’s legendary villain, Coffin Joe. I dug it.
A Working Man
Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters.
