Movie Review: 'A Working Man' Reckoning with the Meaning of Jason Statham

A Working Man

Directed by David Ayer

Written by Sylvester Stallone, David Ayer

Starring Jason Statham, Michael Pena, David Harbour

Released March 28th, 2025

Published April 1st, 2025

A Working Man stars Jason Statham as Levon Cade, a construction worker who used to be an English Special Forces operative. When the daughter of his boss, Jenny, played by Arianna Rivas, is kidnapped by human traffickers, Levon’s boss, played by Michael Pena, asks Levon to use his Special Forces skills to get her back. He’s reluctant to jump in as he is in the middle of a custody battle for his daughter with her grandfather who cares for the child in the wake of her mother’s suicide. That said, the premise of the movie has Jason Statham brutally murdering human trafficking scum, his hemming and hawing won’t last long.

Entering the bleak world of human trafficking, Levon needs all of his skills from torturing drug dealers to pretending to be a drug dealer. He’s a natural detective with the chameleonic abilities of an undercover cop and the physical gifts of a Navy Seal. It’s wish fulfillment male revenge fantasy nonsense that hand-wringers like myself cannot criticize for fear of being accused of siding with the human trafficking scum. Thus, populism bullies us into just pretending that A Working Man is good because human trafficking is bad. Working outside the law, subverting the justice system is good, and the rule of law is useless.

During the 1988 Presidential election, Democratic Presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, was asked a question regarding the death penalty. Bernard Shaw of CNN asked Dukakis, and I’m paraphrasing: "Would you support the death penalty if someone murdered and raped your wife, Kitty Dukakis?" It’s a terrible question. It’s a gross exaggeration and Dukakis should have dismissed it out of hand. He didn’t. Instead, Dukakis tried to offer a nuanced answer that underscored his opposition to the death penalty. This failure was among many reasons why he lost the election. People don’t want a nuanced answer, they want to stick a knife in the throat of the person who hurt a member of their family.

Thus, Jason Statham in A Working Man is our vengeance avatar. Those who have never experienced a kidnapping or can’t imagine what human trafficking is like, gravitate to the simplest solution imaginable, an avenging angel who kills the people we don’t like and embodies our values of hating scummy people who engage in human trafficking. He’s also someone that you can project yourself onto. Men who feel powerless against the ills of the world can look to Jason Statham and wish themselves to be him, to be powerful, skilled, and deadly in the fight against evil.

Is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Your mileage may vary. I am growing cautious about vengeance related media. I think it is grooming audiences to be lazy and expect that an actual Jason Statham will step in to fix things. If we truly want to end human trafficking it would take a great deal of systemic change, changes in the law, economic changes, and a reckoning for men to begin to understand the role that casual misogyny plays in endangering women. The casual dehumanization of women that is engaged in publicly on social media influences a culture where women’s sexuality becomes commodified and creates in those of a particular moral flexibility a permission to act on women as a potential commodity to enrich themselves.

On the other hand: Ha Ha, Bad Guy Go Boom. I can try and be deep about this but I can’t pretend that my lizard brain doesn’t love seeing Jason Statham breaking the necks of bad guys. It’s the simplest possible storytelling. It’s good versus evil in the most basic sense. You don’t have to reckon with anything, it’s brainless violent revenge that feels righteous because the good and evil dynamic could not be any simpler. This appeals to anyone who feels too tired or overwhelmed by the actual real world issues that feel out of our control.

I’m not here to shame people who enjoy Jason Statham movies. I am among you, I won’t throw stones when I too am in the glass house. That said, we should be a little more wary of these storylines and seek out more nuanced media approaches to these topics. Human Trafficking is real and is a problem that must be solved and while Jason Statham is wonderful, in real life, he’s just an actor. He’s not coming to save us. We are the only ones who can fight issues like Human Trafficking but it will require the kind of hard work, sacrifice, and self examination that we tend to want to avoid.

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