Levon Cade is on the cusp of a very difficult decision: He’s been asked to help with something that he cannot do. He simply can’t!
Levon is a former black-ops specialist—and a particularly gifted specialist at that. But he’s left the service and put that life behind him.
These days, he works construction. Levon manages a diverse crew of men who respect him. He has a great relationship with the small building company’s owner, Joe Garcia, and his family. And between the hard work and the friendships he’s developed, things are pretty good.
In fact, the only bad thing in his life is the fact that he hasn’t been able to be with his young daughter, Meredith. During one of his long missions away, his wife committed suicide. And Meredith was sent by the courts to live with her grandfather. He’s a man who hates Levon and is using all his resources to keep Meredith away from him.
Still, Levon won’t give up. He’s not someone who ever gives up. He loves Meredith, and he will find a way to be with her once more. But in a way, all of that has led him to the tough decision he’s mulling.
You see, Joe Garcia’s daughter, Jenny, was taken: snatched out of a bar where she was celebrating with friends. The abduction was so quick, so well-orchestrated and precise, that Levon is sure it was far from a random kidnapping.
Joe wants Levon to bring his black-ops skills out of mothballs. But if this situation is what Levon thinks it is—a case of human trafficking—then things will get very messy. And if things go wrong, it could hurt his chances of getting Meredith back.
However, Joe and Jenny and the whole Garcia family have been good to him. They’ve cared for him. They’ve fed him. They gave him, well, a family when he needed one. For that matter, Levon is fully aware of how painful it is to have someone thoughtlessly snatch a loved one out of your life. So …
There is no choice. He will take off his hard hat and slip back into being the hard-edged, strategically minded soldier he used to be. He will save his friend’s daughter!
And hopefully, he’ll somehow be able to keep his own.
Early on in A Working Man, Levon and his father-in-law, are at odds. But the fact is, they both care deeply about Meredith. They simply believe they are best suited to care for the young girl’s needs. And it’s obvious that Meredith cares for them both, too, though she very much wants to be with her dad.
Meredith mentions that she’s intensely angry at her mom for dying and leaving she and her dad. Levon calms his daughter and says, “That’s OK. I hurt, too.”
Levon also gets along very well with his construction crew and coworkers. They look up to him. And when one of them is threatened by thugs, Levon protects him.
Of course, Levon risks a lot to aid the Garcias. And they are incredibly grateful for his help. The family members all hug and verbally express their love for one another.
Levon also has a close friend named Gunnar. He’s a former soldier who lost his sight when the two of them fought together. Levon seeks the big man’s advice and help, and Gunnar gives it willingly, also looking after Meredith for a short while.
When Jenny’s abductors experience Levon’s lethal skills firsthand, they exclaim, “We are fighting a devil!” and cross themselves.
While being held captive and treated violently, Jenny prays the Lord’s Prayer aloud.
We see female dancers in skimpy outfits. A large muscular man wears a vest that leaves his chest bare. Some women wear formfitting outfits that display cleavage.
Jenny has been kidnapped to be the sexual toy and torture victim of a wealthy man. At one point he hangs her up by her wrists—while she’s dressed in a slip—and threatens her with sharp blades. (We never see the man actually molest her, though she is thumped about by her male and female captors.)
Levon’s violent and thumping search for Jenny is very choreographed and John Wick-like at times.
He battles his way through rooms of assailants connected to the Russian Mob, snapping arms and legs as he goes. He stabs victims about the neck and chest, and he blasts at them with pistols and rifles. The resulting scenes splash gore on walls, floors, tables and ceilings.
Levon also tosses several grenades into the crowded mix. In one apartment scene, we see a Russian mob member examining the bloody aftermath. And then a “cleaning crew” comes in and carries the dead off in butchered (and more portable) plastic-wrapped pieces.
A man has his face ripped open after a captive girl bites his cheek. A man is waterboarded in a bathroom tub, choking and gasping for air. An individual is knocked out with a coffee pot, bound to a chair, punched, slapped and then pushed backward into a pool where he dies screaming underwater.
Women are slapped to the ground and threatened with guns jammed into their necks and foreheads. A fight breaks out in the back of a van between three large men. Faces are bloodied, and bones are broken before an errant gunshot blows out the brains of the van’s driver, gore splashes the windshield. An assailant blows a large hole through a man’s raised palm.
Russian thugs tie up a victim and set his house afire. A car full of men chase a motorcyclist, shooting automatic weapons at him. Vehicles crash. Someone’s throat is slashed from behind. People are smashed face-first into hard surfaces. A police car gets blown up, burning the screaming occupants alive.
Add to all that a parade of thugs thumping and bashing others. All in all, A Working Man is a decidedly gory mess.
The film’s cast spits out some 80 f-words and a half-dozen s-words, along with a handful of uses each of “a–hole,” “b–tard” and “b–ch.” God’s name is misused a total of three times (two of those with “d–n).
Someone uses crude hand gestures.
Between bar scenes and the interactions of the Russian mobsters, large groups of people smoke cigarettes and drink. They consume beer, wine, vodka, champagne, snifters of cognac and glasses of other hard alcohol.
Levon masquerades as a drug dealer and buys large bags of crack cocaine from several mob-connected people. (He tosses the drugs in a stream and down a toilet after receiving them.) A man smokes a hash pipe. Someone snorts coke.
While out at a bar, Jenny’s drunken friend vomits. We never learn why Levon’s wife committed suicide, but it’s implied that it was either because of loneliness or severe depression.
We often think that 2009’s Taken was the first time we saw a man “with a certain set of skills” heading off to rescue a loved one from evil’s grimy grasp. But let’s face it, that dust-off-your-six-guns movie template has been around for a long time.
And it’s at the core of director David Ayer’s A Working Man.
The difference this go ‘round is that the central baddies are Russian drug-running human traffickers, and the central hero is a former black-ops soldier.
Frankly, actor Jason Statham is pretty much the perfect choice for that hero’s role—slipping into the part with all the glinty eyed, granite-jawed, hard-muscled gusto that you could hope for.
After all, the point of these films is to see the foul nastiness of the world be beaten down with a painful glee. And that one-man army called Statham ruthlessly destroys evil in ways we never could.
A Working Man delivers all that in spades. It goes over the top to shoot, drown and eviscerate many, many baddies while pursuing a cinematic catharsis.
But … in a very real sense, that’s the problem with this film, too. Because during A Working Man’s two hour run time, viewers are submerged in a densely foul and coarsely violent mire of evil. Even the hero deals out his “justice” in heartless and vicious ways.
You could say that goodness wins here, but what’s really being celebrated onscreen? And what do we gain?
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
