If it’s New Years, you can bet the latest Jason Statham movie will be opening in Japan. One of our more reliable action heroes, Statham can generally carry a lame script just with the cut of his scowl, and this particular vehicle was produced and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, based on a novel, so it held some promise when it first came to my attention. (David Ayer is the co-writer and director.) As the title suggests, Statham plays a blue collar bloke named Levon Cade, who’s the foreman for a struggling family-owned contruction company in Chicago. The opening credits fill us in on his background: a career soldier in what appears to be a joint British-American commando unit. Further exposition tells us his wife died by her own hand and that his rich ex-father-in-law (Richard Heap) blames him for her death because he thinks Levon can’t overcome his violent nature, and thus tries to keep his daughter from him. The script doesn’t necessarily refute this assertion because Levon himself confesses that the construction company CEO (Michael Pena) saved his life by giving him a job despite his “untreated PTSD.” Such personal struggles are thrown out the window when the boss’s daughter (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring and Levon straps on his guns and knives in order to bring her back.

So far, so perfectly formulaic for a Jason Statham movie, but the implausibilities that usually come with the territory are never addressed as such and so just pile up in a jumble of confusing cross purposes, draining A Working Man (remove the indefinite article from the title and it could have been mistaken for a superhero movie) of the tension that’s necessary for this kind of vigilante film. Early on we’re introduced to Levon’s fighting capabilities when a group of Spanish-speaking goons harrasses one of his workers for reasons never revealed, and so we wait in vain for the other shoe to drop, which it never does. Then there’s Levon’s sudden resourcefulness. In the beginning we’re told he’s broke because of the lawyers’ fees needed to regain custody of his daughter (he sleeps in his truck), but once he has a “mission” he’s suddenly got all this cash and expensive tech and weaponry. Is it because of his network of commando vets, including David Harbour as a blind gun hoarder living in the woods? These questions just hang in the air and never evaporate.

Even the fight scenes are a coin toss. An early confrontation in a biker bar is so incoherently choreographed that you lose track of who’s beating who; but a little bitlater, there’s a more carefully shot two-on-one brawl in the back of a van that hits every note perfectly. Unfortunately, once the search turns serious and a whole extended family of Russian gangsters gets involved, it’s all gunplay. I don’t ask for surprises in my Jason Statham movies, but I would have thought Stallone knew something about the basic requirements of a violent action thriller.

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).

A Working Man home page in Japanese

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