Action mega-star Jason Statham still looks powerful for a man inching toward 60. And the older he gets, the more worn and lived-in his face becomes, like my therapist’s leather couch. So what if he doesn’t take off his shirt as much anymore? He’s built like a wrestler, but graceful, too, an experienced kickboxer with a trademark, face-smashing spinning back kick. In A Working Man, the UK-born Statham stars as an all-American man’s man with a Cockney accent (he was a Royal Marine long ago, you see). His character is a foreman, a father, a friend — just a decent, salt-of-the-earth dude, albeit one with a Costco-size body count from his distant past.
Statham is at the top of his game in this formulaic but satisfying, wannabe pre-summer blockbuster, and he’s the last of a breed of stone-faced theatre kids playing unstoppable badasses. This proud lineage includes such testosterone-jacked showbiz legends as Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Charles Bronson.
Are you unfamiliar with Bronson? If you’re under [cough] 40, Bronson was one of the great cinematic tough guys, a serious-looking hombre who flosses with barbed wire. He’s best remembered for his stint as a heroic gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven (1960), that tough guy digging tunnels in The Great Escape (1963), and as a vigilante in the cult hit Death Wish (1971), a reactionary revenge flick set in lawless ’70s New York City. If there were a Mount Rushmore of Action Heroes, he’d be a strong candidate after first-round contenders Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
There are a lot of actors who deserve the honor of that fourth slot: Chuck Norris? Wesley Snipes? Vin Diesel? But consider Statham. His mug belongs on that mountain. Look at him. He’s earned it.
His characters never throw the first punch. They do their duty without complaint. They swallow their pain and refuse to quit. Most of all, they hate bullies. Action heroes usually loathe them, along with two-faces, bullshit artists, and weasels. Take Stallone’s troubled Vietnam vet, Rambo: who hates prejudiced cops, duplicitous CIA agents and sadistic Soviet lieutenant colonels (not in that order).
Speaking of Stallone: He produced and co-wrote A Working Man with director David Ayers. The once and former Rambo also goes way back with Statham, who was one of the young guns in The Expendables (2010), the first in a franchise of Avengers-type team-ups of aging masters of mayhem that doubles as an ode to ’80s machismo and human growth hormones. Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, and Arnold Schwarzenegger have all graced these mega-action flicks, among many others; even Harrison Ford shows up in one. These movies are cheesy, the violence is cartoonish, and the Botox budget must have been huge. But there’s an endearing hang-out vibe in each flick that suggests the cure for male loneliness is becoming a mercenary and going on missions with your bros, who are also mercenaries.
A Working Man is Statham’s second movie with director David Ayer in a row, having starred in Ayer’s The Beekeeper last year, a ridiculous, chaotic hoot. Statham plays a humble beekeeper who is also a member of “the Beekeepers,” a super-secret organization that occasionally saves the world. The villains are Internet scammers who steal money from kindly old ladies, and they deserve every lead kiss Statham blows at them.
His character in A Working Man, Levon Cade, is just a widower trying to make an honest living in construction. It’s not easy. He has an adoring daughter whose granddad is unreasonably cruel to Cade. But at least his Spanish-speaking coworkers love him, as does the family who owns the business he works for, led by affable Michael Peña. The movie leans heavily into a popular action-movie convention: a damsel in distress. It’s up to Cade to rescue Peña’s character’s daughter from psycho Russian pimps, who briefly threaten his little princess, too.
An unkind critic may call such reheated plot points uninspired, but action-movie fans know Ayers and Statham are honoring their ancestors. Bruce Willis’s John McClane wants to live long enough to reconcile his headstrong hostage wife in Die Hard, and Liam Neeson’s CIA agent in 2009’s Taken employs his “particular set of skills” to rescue his daughter from sex traffickers. Neeson allowed middle-age dads everywhere to imagine they, too, could slowly, methodically, kick ass without hurting their knees. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando (1987) is about a strangely hilarious killing machine who dispatches dozens of less-talented commandos to hell to rescue his daughter, played by sitcom star Alyssa Milano. His 1993 movie Last Action Hero is not an action movie; it’s a meta-comedy with a magical premise. The movie makes fun of the genre back when it was pumping out dependable hits. It’s not funny but not dull, either — a fascinating flop. (One thing to love about good old-fashioned R-rated action movies? They are irony-free zones.)
Statham’s body of work is impressive, spanning three decades and is notable for its overall dedication to one genre: action. He’s hell on wheels in The Transporter (2002) as a stunt driver-turned-underworld messenger, a hit that proved he could carry an action movie. (It helped that Statham had a brief stint as a competitive driver, representing England at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, New Zealand, before becoming a model and actor.) The man is a pro who delivers the goods, whether he’s fighting giant sharks in The Meg/ Meg 2: The Trench or bantering with the Rock in the preposterous, physics-defying Fast and Furioius spinoff Hobbs & Shaw. And then there is Crank: High Voltage, a crude, frenetic sequel to a movie about a poisoned hitman who requires jolts of adrenaline to live while he hunts for the antidote. In Crank 2, he wakes up with an artificial heart that needs electric shocks to keep pumping while he searches for his real heart —it’s bonkers shit.
Ever since he started his career as a fast talker in Guy Ritchie‘s stylish English gangster flicks like 1998’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, the camera-friendly bruiser slowly climbed the ladder to make-believe badass. Statham’s allure is his sniper intensity. He’s a mean-looking bloke who looks like he could explode at any moment, but he’s also cheeky enough to lob cute pre-kill quips. The star is a classic triple threat: he can smirk, glower, and is very good at close-quarter combat. Remember: every Hollywood fistfight is as choreographed as the climax of Dirty Dancing. This man can waltz with the best of them.
In A Working Man, Statham isn’t just a blue-collar super-soldier; he’s a living symbol of a fading code. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, Cade speaks softly and carries an M14 semi-automatic rifle with a thermal scope and suppressor. He’s not a sarcastic motormouth like Ryan Reynolds, for instance. Cade stuffs his emotions down, the way granddad did it. Or Sean Connery.
Unlike other genres exploring complex human themes, action movies are simple power fantasies based on a few masculine virtues. Examples of said virtues: There are good guys and bad guys. Good guys are loyal and honest and help the weak. Bad guys are selfish, greedy, and prone to speeches. There was a time when we, collectively, wanted men to be protectors, not just of women and children but of basic social contracts we learned as kids, like sharing your toys and not insulting other kids. That’s over now. Here’s another thing action movies teach: punching solves most problems.
This might not be the most virtuous lesson one can learn, but it’s a good time — a release. Who hasn’t idly daydreamed about taking a flamethrower to their neighbor’s fifteen-foot-tall plastic skeleton in their yard? Yes, the Bible says, violence only begets violence, but in Rambo: First Blood Part II, an explosive-tipped arrow begets the gory death of the Soviet commander who tortures. Once upon a time last century, boys were encouraged to look up to hard-drinking, chain-smoking, emotionally constipated John Wayne types — the Kronos of performative alpha males — who all died young from heart attacks. They weren’t ideal teachers. Drunks, mostly.
But maybe “strong and silent” is preferable to modern men who constantly bitch and moan online about all the people who hurt their feelings. Can you imagine any of Jason Statham’s rugged one-man-army characters sitting down for a three-hour podcast with a blowhard?
It’s not as if action movies are on the wane. There have been some excellent ones recently — just check out last year’s Rebel Ridge, a cerebral action thriller directed by Jeremy Saulnier and starring Aaron Pierre as a thoughtful but formidable Marine fighting a crooked sheriff. Gerard Butler is still regularly employed. As a world-weary merc in his gritty Extraction movies, Chris Hemsworth proves he’s more than just That Hammer Guy in Those Comic-Book Movies. (For the record: Superhero movies are a sub-genre of action and make a lot of money. They are also inferior.)
But all these ripped go-gooders fight evil in the shadows of icons like Statham. And despite the fact that A Working Man dominated this weekend’s box office, there is a fear the specific type of tough-guy movies he makes aren’t long for this world. His brand of heroism isn’t as fashionable as it once was. When he hangs up his tactical bandolier, you have to wonder if there will be a new generation of strong, silent types to take his place, and enough of an audience of men who’ll want to pretend for a few hours that they have what it takes to save the world from powerful men who only care about themselves.
